Other priorities include developing a more efficient discharge planning process and helping community members understand the hospital’s service offerings, said Felicia Slaton-Young, community board member at St. and executive director and co-founder of the Greater Englewood Chamber of Commerce.
For years, the hospital has engaged with locals through mobile health units in the neighborhood and an annual community baby shower where St. Bernard partners with other clinics to provide resources for first-time parents.
While external measures of quality and safety can play a valuable role in helping providers focus on certain risk areas, some say the metrics aren’t always the best reflections of performance for facilities that only see high-risk, complex patients.
This is true for Westchester Medical Center, a referral academic medical center in Valhalla, New York, which has received D’s from Leapfrog Group for the past three years.
As an institution that does virtually no primary or preventative care and receives more than 12,600 patient transfers from local hospitals, it is often extremely difficult to meet certain standards, said Dr. Renee Garrick, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Westchester Medical Center Health Network.
Even so, the center still uses CMS measures and Leapfrog Group scores as guides to enhance care and uses its data on infections and adverse events to identify areas for improvement, Garrick said.
“We may not always be able to successfully improve every score,” she said. “But what we care about is, ‘Did the patient get great care?’”
Low performers
Of the more than 2,800 hospitals graded biannually by the Leapfrog Group, less than 1% receive an ‘F.’ The grade indicates that a hospital is not performing well on numerous safety standards, including communication, infection prevention and surgical error, said Missy Danforth, vice president of health care ratings at The Leapfrog Group.
It is “extremely rare” for hospitals to go from an ‘F’ to an ‘A’ as quickly as St. Bernard, Danforth said.
The secrets to success for facilities able to undergo rapid improvement often include talking to frontline staff about technology barriers, retraining clinicians on safety processes and changing structural measures.
“In our mind, the sustaining of high performance is almost as important as achieving it for the first time,” she said.
