From Board to Bedside: How the Application of Financial Structures to Safety and Quality Can Drive Accountability in a Large Health Care System.

BACKGROUND: As the health care system in the United States places greater emphasis on the public reporting of quality and safety data and its use to determine payment, provider organizations must implement structures that ensure discipline and rigor regarding these data. An academic health system, as part of a performance management system, applied four key components of a financial reporting structure to support the goal of top-to-bottom accountability for improving quality and safety. FOUR KEY COMPONENTS OF A FINANCIAL REPORTING STRUCTURE: The four components implemented by Johns Hopkins Medicine were governance, accountability, reporting of consolidated quality performance statements, and auditing. Governance is provided by the health system's Patient Safety and Quality Board Committee, which reviews goals and strategy for patient safety and quality, reviews quarterly performance for each entity, and holds organizational leaders accountable for performance. An accountability plan includes escalating levels of review corresponding to the number of months an entity misses the defined performance target for a measure. A consolidated quality statement helps inform the Patient Safety and Quality Board Committee and leadership on key quality and safety issues. An audit evaluates the efficiency and effectiveness of processes for data collection, validation, and storage, as to ensure the accuracy and completeness of quality measure reporting. CONCLUSION: If hospitals and health systems truly want to prioritize improvements in safety and quality, they will need to create a performance management system that ensures data validity and supports performance accountability. Without valid data, it is difficult to know whether a performance gap is due to data quality or clinical quality.

Sustaining Reliability on Accountability Measures at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

BACKGROUND: In 2012 Johns Hopkins Medicine leaders challenged their health system to reliably deliver best practice care linked to nationally vetted core measures and achieve The Joint Commission Top Performer on Key Quality Measures ®program recognition and the Delmarva Foundation award. Thus, the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality implemented an initiative to ensure that ≥96% of patients received care linked to measures. Nine low-performing process measures were targeted for improvement-eight Joint Commission accountability measures and one Delmarva Foundation core measure. In the initial evaluation at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, all accountability measures for the Top Performer program reached the required ≥95% performance, gaining them recognition by The Joint Commission in 2013. Efforts were made to sustain performance of accountability measures at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. METHODS: Improvements were sustained through 2014 using the following conceptual framework: declare and communicate goals, create an enabling infrastructure, engage clinicians and connect them in peer learning communities, report transparently, and create accountability systems. One part of the accountability system was for teams to create a sustainability plan, which they presented to senior leaders. To support sustained improvements, Armstrong Institute leaders added a project management office for all externally reported quality measures and concurrent reviewers to audit performance on care processes for certain measure sets. CONCLUSIONS: The Johns Hopkins Hospital sustained performance on all accountability measures, and now more than 96% of patients receive recommended care consistent with nationally vetted quality measures. The initiative methods enabled the transition of quality improvement from an isolated project to a way of leading an organization.

Creating a high-reliability health care system: improving performance on core processes of care at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

In this article, the authors describe an initiative that established an infrastructure to manage quality and safety efforts throughout a complex health care system and that improved performance on core measures for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care, and children's asthma. The Johns Hopkins Medicine Board of Trustees created a governance structure to establish health care system-wide oversight and hospital accountability for quality and safety efforts throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine. The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality was formed; institute leaders used a conceptual model nested in a fractal infrastructure to implement this initiative to improve performance at two academic medical centers and three community hospitals, starting in March 2012. The initiative aimed to achieve ≥ 96% compliance on seven inpatient process-of-care core measures and meet the requirements for the Delmarva Foundation and Joint Commission awards. The primary outcome measure was the percentage of patients at each hospital who received the recommended process of care. The authors compared health system and hospital performance before (2011) and after (2012, 2013) the initiative. The health system achieved ≥ 96% compliance on six of the seven targeted measures by 2013. Of the five hospitals, four received the Delmarva Foundation award and two received The Joint Commission award in 2013. The authors argue that, to improve quality and safety, health care systems should establish a system-wide governance structure and accountability process. They also should define and communicate goals and measures and build an infrastructure to support peer learning.

Demonstrating high reliability on accountability measures at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

BACKGROUND: Patients continue to suffer preventable harm from the omission of evidence-based therapies. To remedy this, The Joint Commission developed core measures for therapies with strong evidence and, through the Top Performer on Key Quality Measures program, recognize hospitals that deliver those therapies to 95% of patients. The Johns Hopkins Medicine board of trustees committed to high reliability and to providing > or = 96% of patients with the recommended therapies. METHODS: The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality coordinated the core measures initiative, which targeted nine process measures for the 96% performance goal: eight Joint Commission accountability measures and one Delmarva Foundation core measure. A conceptual model for this initiative included communicating goals, building capacity with Lean Sigma methods, transparently reporting performance and establishing an accountability plan, and developing a sustainability plan. Clinicians and quality improvement staff formed one team for each targeted process measure, and Armstrong Institute staff supported the teams work. The primary performance measure was the percentage of patients who received the recommended process of care, as defined by the specifications for each of The Joint Commission's accountability measures. RESULTS: The > or = 96% performance goal was achieved for 82% of the measures in 2011 and 95% of the measures in 2012. CONCLUSIONS: With support from leadership and a conceptual model to communicate goals, use robust improvement methods, and ensure accountability, The Johns Hopkins Hospital achieved high reliability for The Joint Commission accountability measures.