Is Hospital Quality voluntary or is just the reporting?

To capture, report and use Quality Measures more efficiently is a good investment.

 

CMS will drive dramatic changes to quality reporting and incentives for annual payment.  The RHQDAPU initiative requires "sub-section (d)" hospitals to submit data regarding 27 quality measures for the several conditions such as acute myocardial infarction, heart failure and pneumonia.  Hospitals that do not participate in the RHQDAPU initiative will receive a reduction of 2.0 percent in their Medicare Annual Payment Update for fiscal year 2009. To avoid the reduction in their Annual Payment Update, hospitals must meet specific requirements outlined in the RHQDAPU participation steps.

 

Quality Measures

Measuring quality and publicly reporting the information is a powerful mechanism to drive improvements in our nation's health care system.  Health care providers need standardized performance information to support their improvement efforts.  Improving the Quality of Care pays and will decrease hospital costs, prevent deaths, complications, readmissions and days in the hospital, each year.

 

What is the Cost of Quality? 

The cost of “meeting minimum requirements” usually includes a manual process of gathering data, creating reports and submitting them.  With an automated process and data extraction platform any hospital can:

• Reduce the burden of data abstraction from multiple systems and reporting.
• Eliminate manual lookup, writing on forms, re-keying data for reports.
• Reduce the time per report from 3 hours of 15 minutes. (12:1)
• Improve the Employee Satisfaction of the QI Nurse Staff and others.
• Rapidly respond to changes in data requirements or policy/procedure/process.
• Reduce readmission rates or complications.
• Eliminate CMS fines and prepare for Pay for Performance.

 

Data collection is one of the biggest challenges for providers participating in pay-for-performance programs, says Trent Haywood, MD, deputy chief clinical officer for CMS, and some struggle to reduce the data collection burden for clinicians. Best performers have found effective ways to meet this challenge.

 

Beyond Minimum

A platform for capturing and using any data from any system will provide the ability to measure and analyze more information.  Combine this with the workflow automation that allows for rapid process changes, fast deployment of process change to the staff, and the ability to institute value-added processes for Alerts, Notifications, Escalation, and Reporting of Exceptions, and the benefits can be quite significant.  Some examples that are well within reach with a platform such as this include:

• Rapidly change and comply with IPPS FY2009.
• Easily respond to audit requests.
• Add reports for Physicians, Nurses, or anyone seeking improvement.
• Report real-time information on scoreboards or dashboards.