About HQI’s Sentinel Signal Detection System Report
HQI’s sentinel signal detection system automatically detects abnormal changes (i.e., signals) in the incidence of diagnosis categories from hospital encounter records in the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform (HQIP). Every quarter, HQI aggregates these signals across reporting hospitals to provide a statewide perspective.
Emergency Department
Q2 2024 saw a surge in emergency department visits as allergy season hit full force, with hospitals reporting a significant rise in cases of rhinitis, acute conjunctivitis, sneezing, coughing, and other allergy-related symptoms. Viral infections causing skin and mucous membrane lesions, such as hand-foot-mouth disease, pox viruses, and molluscum contagiosum, were also on the rise. Hospitals are improving efforts to capture social determinants of health, with increasing signals in Q2 of patients facing psychosocial challenges like inadequate social and emotional support, underemployment, dependent relatives needing care at home, divorce, and family with drug and/or alcohol addiction problems. Patients with education and literacy issues signaled as well.
Ambulatory Surgery
Surgery centers signaled for infectious and parasitic disease screenings, a standard infection prevention protocol during flu and allergy season. Additionally, a significant number of patients were flagged with nutritional deficiencies, including hypovolemia, electrolyte imbalances, low protein levels, and vitamin K deficiencies. These conditions require urgent correction before invasive procedures to avoid negative outcomes.
HQIP provides hospital leaders with the capability to review the latest signals for their organization each quarter. In this report, these signals are aggregated across reporting hospitals and provided as counts representing a statewide signal.
As an example, consider these results for the ICD-10 category Z20:
The ICD-10 category represents all ICD-10 codes that begin with these three characters.
The Positive column gives the number of reporting hospitals that had a statistically significant increase in the count of codes in this ICD-10 category for this quarter (i.e., the count of positive signals).
The Negative column gives the number of reporting hospitals that had a statistically significant decrease in the count of codes in this ICD-10 category for this quarter (i.e., the count of negative signals).
The Neutral column gives the number of reporting hospitals that did not see a statistically significant change in the count of codes in this ICD-10 category this quarter.
The Net Signal Value provided is the absolute difference between the number of Positive and Negative signals. The absolute difference is the difference between the two with a positive sign; a Positive Signal count of 20 and a Negative Signal count of 12 would lead to a Net Signal Value of 8 (as would a Positive Signal count of 12 and a Negative Signal count of 20).
The Description gives the text overview associated with this ICD-10 category.
The # category provides a bar chart with the quarterly counts of ICD-10 codes within this category among reporting hospitals. Hovering over each bar with a mouse cursor will provide a tooltip with the quarterly counts.