Chosen Quality Measures for the Dashboard
Due to working with various people, healthcare organizations must continuously strive to advance their operations. Organizations must assess and analyze internal processes to determine what should be enhanced (Johnson & Sollecito, 2020). The Community General Hospital (CGH) is a reputable medical facility, yet the institution could advance in several areas.
The benchmarks CGH should prioritize are elective delivery, the death rate of patients having a stroke, influenza-vaccinated workers, individuals informed about medicines, surgical site infections, readmissions, emergency department (ED) wait times, and patient-to-nurse ratio. The quality and safety measures that CGH should concentrate on are meant to demonstrate its functioning, and the obtained information can be utilized for improvement.
Significance of the Quality Measures to the Organization
The identified eight criteria are important to the organization because of three reasons. First, some benchmarks represent processes that have already received attention from CGH’s executives and employees as areas for advancement. For example, CGH is working on decreasing waiting time in ED and reducing readmissions, so the facility is likely to need information about its progress to determine whether it is moving in the right direction.
Second, some of the standards reflect requirements that CGH should follow if it wishes to be approved by government agencies. For instance, elective delivery is a perinatal care measure for hospital accreditation (The Joint Commission [TJC], 2023).
Third, since CGH’s Board wishes for data that would allow the organization to be compared to other institutions, some criteria depict across-the-country grading standards. For example, the percentage of influenza-vaccinated employees is an infection prevention indicator and one of the benchmarks for the nation to rate healthcare facilities (The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS], n.d.). Therefore, the identified measures are important for CGH because they reflect standards for the institution’s progress, accreditation, and status.
Alignment of the Quality Measures with the Quadruple Aim
The eight discussed criteria represent the objectives of the Quadruple Aim (QA). In order to facilitate the functioning of healthcare facilities, QA pursues enhanced experience of care, increased health of populations, reduced costs of services, and advanced work life of medical professionals (Johnson & Sollecito, 2020). The former goal is reflected in such measures as wait times in the ED and individuals being informed about medicines so that people can promptly receive assistance and understand why they were prescribed a certain drug.
The second QA objective is deliberated in benchmarks like influenza-vaccinated workers to control the illness’s transmission. The third goal of QA is contemplated in such benchmarks as readmissions to lessen expenses and correct the missteps of initial insufficient treatment. The only measure correlating with the final QA objective is the patient-to-nurse ratio to ensure that CGH has enough nurses to assist people without causing burnout (Johnson & Sollecito, 2020). Notably, more benchmarks for the fourth QA goal were not selected because CGH’s staff members already appear pleased with their employment. Overall, QA is represented in the identified eight measures due to the standards corresponding with the four aims.
Strategy for Effective Communication of the Dashboard Across the Organization
The dashboard can be utilized as a leadership tool toward better patient outcomes by allowing CGH to derive information on what should be advanced. The quality of an organization’s operations can be assessed by employing the Donabedian model, which suggests three categories for quality criteria, and the selected measures fall under the proposed classes (Tossaint-Schoenmakers et al., 2021). For instance, the outcome type involves such benchmarks as readmissions due to being correlated with treatment results (Tossaint-Schoenmakers et al., 2021).
Leveraging the Dashboard as a Leadership Tool for Enhancing Patient Outcomes
Consequently, the dashboard reveals that CGH has a low percentage of readmissions, indicating that the hospital provides sufficient medical assistance. The two other classes are also important to achieve positive patient outcomes. For example, the structure category includes measures like the percentage of individuals informed about their prescribed medicines, which reveals a potential area of concern (Tossaint-Schoenmakers et al., 2021). Therefore, the dashboard can be used as a leadership tool because it contains criteria that can suggest what needs attention from CGH’s executives to enhance patient outcomes.
References
Johnson, J. K., & Sollecito, W. A. (2020). McLaughlin & Kaluzny’s continuous quality improvement in health care (5th ed.). Jones and Bartlett Learning.
The Joint Commission. (2023). Specifications manual for Joint Commission national quality measures. Web.
The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (n.d.). Hospital compare. Medicare. Web.
Tossaint-Schoenmakers, R., Versluis, A., Chavannes, N., Talboom-Kamp, E., & Kasteleyn, M. (2021). The challenge of integrating eHealth into health care: Systematic literature review of the Donabedian model of structure, process, and outcome. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(5), 1-23. Web.