There is a lot of debate in the healthcare industry about benchmarking – how to go about it and whether or not its even important.  According to Studer, the numbers do matter however, the most important part is finding the organizations that do it well and learning from them.

“Consistency and frequency are the true engines of improvement. If you know a behavior will make a difference, you’ll want to practice it every day with every patient—just as you provide medication consistently and at a certain frequency. When you’re sure this is happening, and that people aren’t taking a hit-or-miss approach, you should see the numbers begin to climb.”

“But what really drives people is the realization that by adopting and hardwiring a particular best practice they’re not just moving numbers up. They’re saving lives. When we can remember that, and communicate it regularly to those we work with, we tap into their passion and sense of purpose—and once we do that, we can do anything.”

More Insights from Studer Group Experts.

According to an article in USA Today, health care associated infections are still a major problem in hospitals and despite laws in 29 states to make infection rates public, little statistical information has been released.

Yet something as simple as strict hand hygiene can prevent infections. In the September issue of the journal Health Affairs, for example, University of North Carolina researchers describe changes in the North Carolina Children’s Hospital pediatric intensive care unit. Simply attaching hand sanitizer dispensers to the walls outside patients’ rooms and implementing a few low-cost preventive measures shortened hospital stays more than two days on average, reduced hospitalization costs by more than $12,000 per case and cut death rates by 2.3%.

Congratulations to the staff of Cabell Huntington Hospital on being awarded a Kimberly-Clark 2010 HAI Watchdog Award.  The staff’s education program called “infection inspection” was cited for eliminating central line infections in one intensive care unit for more than a year.  This is just one great example of how simple changes by hospital staff can really make a difference.   Read more about the HAI Watchdog awards.

The AHA recently released the Allied Hospital Association Leadership for Quality – 2011, a guide that describes the common elements for implementing successful performance improvement initiatives among hospitals and health systems.  According to the guide, one of the key elements to a successful initaitive is Leadership Engagement. 

The guide sites two examples:

The Washington State Hospital Association (WSHA) conducts an annual CEO and Trustee Patient Safety Summit. During this meeting, board members are able to learn about board leadership in patient safety from national experts. They discuss how to ask questions about sometimes complex clinical reports to advance quality in their hospitals. Engaging hospital leaders has resulted in a significant shift in the way hospital boards operate, which WSHA has monitored for four consecutive years through a survey.

As another example, the South Carolina Hospital Association (SCHA) created Best on Boards, a voluntary, evidence-based board certification program for hospital trustees and senior hospital leaders. The program has been designed around the governance core competencies identified and published in the AHA’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Health Care Governance report.

According to the guide, “Many allied hospital associations understand that organizational change needs senior-level leadership support to be successful, and they have developed educational programs and tools to ensure this commitment.”

A recent blog post at Infection Control Today discusses new research that shows how beliefs are spread in societies.  Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan adds. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”

This research can easily be applied to the healthcare industry, and hand hygiene practices in particular, when a culture of change is adopted by “true believers”.
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Read the post here.

When Princeton Baptist and Proventix teamed up to tackle the issue of hand hygiene compliance in 2010, the results were a 22% reduction in infection over a 4 month period. 

Based on the results, Princeton Baptist expanded the technology from the post-surgical unit to other parts of the hospital. “We’ve been on multiple floors and we’re staying on average across those floors in the mid 20% range [of infection reductions]. There was enough savings on two floors to cover the cost of the system across the whole hospital,” said Proventix CEO, Harvey Nix.

It is predicted that all of Princeton Baptist will be using the Proventix system by the end of 2011.  Administrators are also looking to expand their use of the device’s other communication features.

“We’re just getting to the point of integrating two-way communication on it, so that they’re able to use the screen to provide feedback and get feedback about the patient that they are about to take care of,” said Mr. Nix. For example, a device could be set to warn anyone washing his hands outside a particular patient’s room that the patient is under isolation precautions.

Read the full article from the July issue of ACP Hospitalist.

Two new studies, both pubished in the August issue of the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC), show a direct correlation between hand hygiene education and a decreased risk in the spread of infections, both in health care workers and school children. 

Read more about these studies.

The article, by Mark R. Chassin, M.D., FACP, M.P.P., M.P.H., president, and Jerod M. Loeb, Ph.D., executive vice president, Health Care Quality Evaluation, both of The Joint Commission, was published this past April in Health Affairs. They conclude that health care organizations have the ability to achieve and maintain consistantly high levels of safety and quality.
“Our aim for health care must be higher. Although we know of no health care organization that has been able to achieve a consistent state of high reliability, we must commit ourselves to reaching this goal,” says Dr. Chassin. “We must strive for high reliability. It is our obligation to patients because it offers the best hope for health care to achieve and sustain the elusive goal of consistent excellence in safety and quality. It is paramount to achieving our vision that all people always receive the safest and highest quality health care.”
Read more from The Joint Commission, read the article and view the abstract