HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the California Hospital Association, creates and distributes quarterly dashboards of publicly available quality data for each California Hospital Association acute-care member hospital. These model dashboards currently provide information on eight measures:
Five outcome measures:
- CLABSI – Central Line-Associated Blood Stream Infection
- Colon SSI – Colon Surgical Site Infection
- NTSV – Nulliparous, Term, Singleton, Vertex Cesarean Birth Rate
- In-Hospital Sepsis Mortality
- Potentially Preventable VTE – Venous Thromboembolism
Three program status measures:
- Maternity Safety Program
- Sepsis Protocol
- Respiratory Monitoring Program
Consumer-level explanations of each measure are provided. Hospitals may also add optional comments about performance and initiatives at that hospital.
Dashboards are emailed quarterly to hospital leaders and quality/patient safety teams. HQI encourages each hospital to publish the information in the dashboard to its public-facing website to increase hospital quality transparency.
Our goal is to have a Quality Transparency Dashboard (or its equivalent) published on every California hospital’s website. Currently, 250 (73.7%) hospitals have posted the dashboard or equivalent information, 77 (22.7%) hospitals are in progress to post, and 12 (3.5%) hospitals are not engaged in the transparency effort.
In response to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) dropping VTE-6 (potentially preventable venous thromboembolism) from their Quality Improvement Program Measures for Acute Care Hospitals for fiscal year 2021, HQI plans to replace the VTE-6 measure at a minimum.
HQI is open to replacing other measures or including additional measures for the Quality Transparency Dashboards starting later this year. We are seeking your ideas and suggestions for new measures to use; any new measure must have publicly available data, updated at least yearly, and include a majority of hospitals. We are also looking for volunteers for a measure revision advisory group (which is expected to meet 2-3 times by teleconference). We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.
To suggest replacement measures or volunteer to join our measure revision advisory group, email HQIAnalytics@HQInstitute.org. For more information about the Quality Transparency Dashboard initiative you can visit us or email us with your questions using the address above.