FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June
21, 2007
Contacts: Jennifer Felsher
Phone: 202-261-7565
Email: jfelsher@ahqa.org
QIOs to Help Hospitals with Highest Mortality Rates
CMS Releases Mortality Data on
Heart Attack and Heart Failure
Washington, DC – Data released today
by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) makes mortality
rates for U.S. hospitals publicly available on its Hospital Compare Web site. Local
Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) will offer assistance to the hospitals
with mortality rates worse than the national average for heart attack and
heart failure to help them improve care. QIOs will work with low-performing
hospitals as part of their current contract with CMS.
The
mortality data reflect the number of Medicare patients with a principal
diagnosis of heart failure or heart attack that died within 30 days of
their hospital stay.
“We are proud that Medicare officials have
turned to the QIOs to address this very serious problem,” said David
Schulke, Executive Vice President of the American Health Quality Association
(AHQA). AHQA represents QIOs, a national network of state-based organizations
that provide hands-on assistance to local health care providers and practitioners
to help them improve the health care system.
CMS has instructed QIOs to help these low-performing
hospitals through a three-step approach:
- Contact
all low-performing hospitals to offer assistance.
- Facilitate
root cause analyses to determine what factors in the hospital or after discharge
contributed to the deaths.
- Work
with each hospital to devise a strategy that will address the identified
causes, lead to system changes, and prevent future unnecessary deaths.
Not
every QIO will participate in this additional work. Twenty-one QIOs
have one or more hospital on the low-performing list in their state. CMS
has already instructed these QIOs to begin work.
“CMS has authorized an additional $2000 per
hospital for QIOs to spend on efforts to help these hospitals,” explained
Schulke. “In many states, it may turn out that this amount is a ‘down
payment’ on the actual work that will be required to identify and change
care processes necessary to prevent future deaths.”
AHQA
supports the expansion of QIO efforts to improve quality in low-performing
hospitals, nursing homes, and other settings of care. “This is a logical expansion of QIO work. QIOs have
a good track record of achieving improvements with low-performing nursing
homes,” Schulke said, “giving troubled providers access to the
QIO resource makes good sense.”
In
August 2005, all QIOs began working with low-performing nursing homes identified
by state regulators. Data collected for the
two years ending in the fourth quarter of 2006 show that these homes are
improving performance faster than the national average for all nursing homes
— achieving 15 percent relative improvement and 37 percent relative improvement
on pressure ulcer care and use of physical restraints, respectively.
|
