Quality Update
Introducing the AHA Quality Center
By Steve Mayfield
The AHA Quality Center is a resource of the American Hospital Association designed to help hospitals accelerate their quality improvement processes to achieve better outcomes for patients and improve organizational performance
While it is not necessary for trustees to understand the clinical reasons for administering aspirin or beta blockers, it is important for them to know that the medical staff and administration have agreed to work together on promulgating best practices; that the organization has methods to assess the appropriateness, timeliness and safety of these efforts; and that there is a commitment to improve these processes and report progress to the board.
Explaining these efforts to improve quality of care and patient safety—in which trustees are active participants—should form the basis of board members’ communication to the community on how the hospital is proactively seeking to make its quality and care processes the best they can be.
To ensure it gets the information it needs to make informed decisions, the board needs to be satisfied with administration and medical staff leaders’ answers to four basic questions:
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- How do we measure it?
- How is our performance changing?
- What are we doing to improve it?
The answers to the first question will reflect the organization’s mission and how it intends to serve its community. The answers to the rest of the questions should reflect the organization’s core competencies and how those can be best applied to the health needs of its community (e.g., an elderly population may have a high rate of diabetes or fractures).
The best answers to the first question will emphasize the need to improve clinical outcomes through developing reliable systems for: patient identification to ensure correct blood type and identify possible allergies; safe medication administration practices; fall prevention and reduction of hospital-acquired infections; improving communication among administration, the board, the medical staff and employees; increasing the availability of information for across-the-board decision-making and efficiency.
Another way to put all these questions is, “What are our goals for safe, effective, affordable and high-quality patient care?” While the first question reflects the board’s role in establishing the organization’s vision, the last three questions address how successful the organization is in achieving that vision and must be understood for the board to fulfill its fiduciary responsibility. Trustees should expect that responses to these questions will open a dialogue on the organization’s commitment to quality and patient safety and how well they are meeting it.
To support these endeavors, the American Hospital Association has developed the AHA Quality Center, which is intended to provide a wealth of easily accessible content to health care organizations that want to accelerate their quality improvement efforts. It will be a source of proven quality improvement practices, models and strategies.
The AHA Quality Center will facilitate peer-to-peer connections through learning and interaction with others who have implemented successful quality programs. It will convene people and ideas to bring together and broadly disseminate content and perspectives from leading practitioners and thought leaders. Further, the AHA Quality Center is designed to be a catalyst for action to support users’ efforts to work with others within their organization to identify and foster innovations in quality and patient safety.
Additional resources within the AHA family will be available to the AHA Quality Center to help deepen its expertise and widen its reach. The Center for Healthcare Governance will work collaboratively with the AHA Quality Center to share its intellectual capital for governance tool development, educational programming and publications. Representatives of the AHA Quality Center will serve on the planning team for the Center for Healthcare Governance’s national and regional conferences and symposia and contribute to the development of its governance quality curriculum. Working with the Health Educational and Research Trust (HRET), both the AHA Quality Center and the Center for Healthcare Governance will have the opportunity to jointly develop resources for trustees to oversee quality. These resources will reflect the latest in governance research findings. Health Forum’s publications and educational venues will also provide vital information.
When health care organizations commit to their trustees to support them in fulfilling their promises to the community, it will be much easier to answer the question: “What are we doing about quality and patient safety?” It will be much easier to publically report hospital performance with pride. And finally, it will be much easier to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to the health and well-being of the communities, families and patients they serve.—Steve Mayfield is the AHA’s senior vice president of quality and performance and director of the AHA Quality Center. To learn more, contact: ahaqualitycenter@aha.org.
This article 1st appeared in the December 2099 issue of Trustee Magazine.
To respond to this article, please click here.
