Seattle – Qualis Health presented the 2006 Awards of Excellence in Healthcare Quality today, recognizing five outstanding healthcare providers in the region. The awards were presented at the Northwest Conference on Patient Safety held in SeaTac.
Jonathan Sugarman, MD, MPH, president and CEO of Qualis Health, made the formal presentation of this year’s awards. Qualis Health is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare delivery and health outcomes. The awards recognize individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to healthcare through innovative, measurable improvements in care.
The awards are given in several categories including individuals, large urban hospitals, rural hospitals, physicians’ offices, health plans, nursing homes, and home health agencies.
“We had an exceptional group of applicants this year and our panelists had a challenging job in selecting our winners. That speaks to the excellent efforts of so many in our state to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare here,” said Sugarman.
Qualis Health’s 2006 Award of Excellence in Healthcare Quality awardees are:
Individual – Lance Heineccius, for his pioneering work to improve healthcare quality with providers in the region. This past year, Heineccius helped launch the Puget Sound Health Alliance, a five-county partnership dedicated to improving healthcare and reducing healthcare costs. He has been a pioneer in improving healthcare since his early work in the 1970s and has contributed significantly to improvements in the delivery of healthcare among dozens of government agencies and private organizations.
Large Urban Hospital – Multicare Health System for reducing the time it takes for a heart attack victim to receive care. Multicare Health System is the largest provider of medical services in Pierce County, south King County and much of Southwest Washington. Multicare’s 20-month project redesigned cardiac catheterization lab procedures and reduced by 30 minutes the time between a call to 911 and when a heart attack victim receives reperfusion treatment, restoring blood flow to the heart. As a result of Multicare’s efforts, 77 percent of patients were treated within 90 minutes or less, which is consistent with the American College of Cardiology’s national goal. Overall, the time from call to treatment fell from 110 to 73 minutes. In addition, the mortality rate for heart attack victims fell from 10.4 percent to 4.1 percent.
The success of this 20-month project was the result of two initiatives by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and six evidence-based practices from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) 100,000 Lives campaign.
Rural Hospital - Dayton General Hospital, of Dayton, for developing a new system approach to medication reconciliation. Medication reconciliation is an important step in improving patient safety through reduction in medication-related adverse events. The utilization of the new system resulted in a 93 percent improvement in un-reconciled medications over a nine-month period. This was accomplished through a team approach that redesigned and developed clear policies and procedures. A core Dayton General Hospital team, which included a pharmacist, chief nursing officer, quality improvement coordinator, and clinical staff, was responsible for creating the new system.
Health Plan – Group Health Cooperative, of Seattle, for creating a system to increase reporting of unusual occurrences. These types of occurrences may indicate opportunities to intervene to improve safety and quality, so it’s important that they be accurately reported. Group Health serves more than 520,000 residents in Idaho and Washington and developed a web-based program that has increased unusual occurrences reporting by 235 percent since 2004.
To accomplish this, Group Health established a Hospital Handoff Communications Team and a “Ticket-to-Ride” form, which provided information about the launch of the new program. In addition, the Surgery, Radiology and Obstetrics departments developed better “handoff tools” to enhance communications between departments, and the Pharmacy department developed a system to ensure that there would be “double verification” of medications and that standardized nomenclature was developed. These procedures have reduced the number of incorrect prescriptions dispensed.
Nursing Home - Regency at Puyallup for reducing pressure ulcers in high-risk nursing home residents. Pressure ulcers are painful skin wounds that can be very difficult to eradicate. Regency used a variety of techniques including small focus group interactions, group education, and a series of failure mode and effects analyses (FMEA) to test action strategies. As a result, in the past 14 months, the nursing home has averaged only 1.6 pressure ulcers per month, which is significantly fewer than the state and national averages of 12.8 and 13.7 percent, respectively.
Home Health Agency - Memorial Home Care Services, of Yakima, for reducing the number of re-hospitalizations. The agency was able to reduce acute care re-hospitalization for home healthcare patients from 31.8 percent to 25.4 percent over a 12-month period. This was done through multiple strategies that included supervisor consultation, identification of high-risk patients, and the use of self-care management and depression screening tools. The staff utilized multiple data collection methods to assess the effectiveness and use of these tools and strategies.
