QIOs in Action

Care Transitions Successes Celebrated Across the Nation

QIOs are hosting or participating in events celebrating the accomplishments of recently completed Care Transitions projects.  CMS Administrator Dr. Donald Berwick took time out of his schedule while in Denver to attend the Colorado Foundation for Medical Care’s community meeting to mark its project's success.  “Optimism comes from you, it comes from the people who get together to show what’s possible and you have done that magnificently here,” he told the Colorado team. His appearance and remarks reflect the growing emphasis CMS is placing on reducing hospital readmissions.

Other health care entities are giving QIO care transitions work the same nod of approval:

• In the state of Washington, a group forming an Accountable Care Organization invited the Washington QIO care transitions community to their meeting, featuring them as a prime example of how community members can work together to improve health care.
• Quality Insights, the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for Pennsylvania, was one of three agencies that received the 2011 Excellence in Action Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Care Transitions for its project with Excela Health Westmoreland Hospital.
• American Medical News recently reported on the success of the Georgia care transitions project at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.
• IPRO, the New York QIO, was featured in an article in the May/June issue of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare about its care transitions project with 50 providers representing hospital, skilled nursing, short-term rehabilitation, home health, hospice, dialysis, and physician practices. The project has made an impact on 68,000 Medicare beneficiaries.

The Nebraska, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Indiana and Rhode Island QIOs also are celebrating successes and acknowledging the role community teamwork plays in reducing hospital readmissions.

Oregon Hospitals Use Survey Results to Drive Change

An article in a recent issue of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare described how 14 Oregon hospitals taking part in the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) or pressure ulcer prevention project led by Acumentra Health, the QIO for Oregon, used the results of internal patient safety culture surveys (including an electronic version of the AHRQ Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture developed by the QIO) to drive improvements in the reliability, quality, and safety of inpatient care. Cultural changes at the hospitals, which involved senior executives as well as frontline staff, focused on promoting open communication and teamwork, redesigning work processes and work areas, and removing the fear of punishment for reporting errors. The article details how “soft” initiatives can strengthen a hospital’s capacity to avoid medical errors and to respond to errors as necessary, even while the hospital conducts “hard” initiatives to improve specific measures of care. 

Qualis Health Collaborates on Value-Based Purchasing Scorecard

In the May 2011 issue of The Hospitalist, Seattle-based Quality Improvement Organization Qualis Health is recognized for its development of interactive calculators or mock scorecards to help hospitals determine where they stand in the area of hospital value-based purchasing. Samaritan Hospital in Moses Lake collaborated with Qualis Health on a scorecard to help staff understand what measures need attention and what the financial repercussions will be if the measures are not addressed. Samaritan began posting individual doctors’ performance results in financial terms, and that started motivating them, according to the hospital’s quality review specialist. Read more about how value-based purchasing is causing hospitals to demand more from hospitalists: http://tinyurl.com/3f8g6rf.