Driving Quality Improvement with InSight™

Lifespan's Rhode Island Hospital (RIH), a teaching institution affiliated with Brown University, had all the required public quality measures tabulated but it was not driving improvements, and needed to achieve their vision. RIH wanted to become a top performing hospital with the goal of attaining the 90th percentile or above for all publicly reported measures.

Challenge

The RIH Quality Management Team spent the majority of their time creating custom reports from raw data to meet quality information needs required to support external and internal reporting requirements for TJC/CMS core measures, Leapfrog/National Quality forum, etc. This left little time to actively support actual focused improvement efforts. Data came from many different sources and was often contained in voluminous reports that were difficult to decipher. The Quality Management Team would get calls from a number of different people from all over the organization who had different data and reporting needs. Senior leadership wanted high-level reports, and someone else needed a very detailed report. It became a difficult situation to manage. There was no expedient mechanism to gather the data from the disparate sources, and dynamically display the information to those accountable for improvements in the various quality measures.

Solution

RIH wanted to Identify and implement a performance management solution to turn their disparate data into useful information that could be widely disseminated to those in RIH accountable for making improvements. They needed a condensed view of the measures supported by drill down and trending/charting capabilities. For accountability, measures needed to be linked from the executive level to the department manager/physician level. Data from multiple sources needed to be integrated and be capable of establishing various paths to support RIH's accountability efforts.

Result

RIH utilized Mediware's InSight™ to develop the necessary visibility, accessibility and accountabilities that spurred action. These actions drove unprecedented improvements in several TJC core measures. For example, Smoking Cessation Counseling indicators didn't point to the parties responsible, so by changing the indicator to drill down to the nursing unit level, those responsible were able to identify where improvement was needed and how their unit fit into the overall picture for the organization. Now Smoking Cessation Counseling has improved to 100%. These initial successes convinced RIH management to build its strategic goals /measures and nursing dashboard in InSight™ to inspire the same response. Today, RIH tracks & monitors over 250 indicators linked directly to their strategic and operational plans. Over 290 executives, directors, managers and physicians use Mediware's InSight™.