(NAHQ e-news: Gleview, Illinois) -- Hospital leaders looking for field-tested practices, proven strategies, tools, and education to support ongoing efforts to improve the patient experience and outcomes in their hospitals have a new resource from the American Hospital Association (AHA).
“Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence” is AHA’s new permanent platform to help hospitals accelerate their journeys to excellence for the patient experience and in clinical and operational performance. The initiative focuses on building hospital capacity to internally improve and bring additional value to patients and communities.
The cornerstone of “Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence” is the Institute of Medicine’s Six Aims for Improvement—safety, timeliness, efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and patient-centeredness. With an approach that emphasizes systems thinking and process management, this new effort seeks to help hospitals reduce waste and inefficiency, optimize the use of resources, and enhance their ability to deliver safe, high-quality, and affordable patient care. The AHA Quality Center has identified six Principles of Performance Excellence to help hospital leaders achieve these goals:
Perfect the patient experience. Care must be respectful of, and responsive to, individual preferences, needs, and values.
Create a high-reliability culture. Hospital cultures must embrace the transformation of hospitals into places where each patient receives the best-quality care every single time.
Manage organizational variability. Some variables, such as scheduling of elective surgery, can be smoothed out to achieve more even patient flow.
Remove waste. Removing inefficiencies such as unnecessary steps can have a direct, positive effect on the bottom line.
Eliminate defects. Finding and resolving problem points will result in greater efficiency and better health outcomes.
Reduce process variation. Using quality tools and frameworks can increase consistency and reduce errors in the clinical delivery of care and the policies and procedures that support care.
The platform was launched in early April with the release of Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence: A Guide to Superior Performance Improvement, a new AHA publication that was distributed to hospital and health system CEOs across the country. Highlighting nearly 30 case studies from a cross-section of America’s hospitals and health systems, this guide identifies field-tested practices to help leaders improve patient experiences and outcomes. The case studies address the four initial focus areas for this new initiative: healthcare-acquired infections, medication management, patient flow, and patient safety. These case studies aren’t intended to provide an exhaustive list of successful and innovative improvement efforts. Rather, the guide is the beginning of AHA’s commitment to highlight hospitals and health systems—all types and sizes from all geographic areas—that are leading the way toward performance excellence in these focus areas.
This publication is available for download from the AHA Quality Center web site at www.ahaqualitycenter.org, along with links to additional AHA resources. Going forward, the AHA will be establishing “Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence” as an ongoing, expanding portfolio by:
Hospitals and health systems are encouraged to share their own experiences in the form of case studies that describe their innovative practices to improve patient care. By sharing best practices, all hospitals can improve the level of care that our patients and communities count on every day.
AHA can be found on the web at www.aha.org.
This story first appeared in the May 2009 issue of NAHQ e-news.
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