Data strategies & benchmarks : the monthly advisory for health care executives
-
Data Strateg Benchmarks · Jun 1999
Data from multihospital study show low compliance with pain management protocols.
Taking pains to follow clinical guidelines. Years after the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research developed clinical practice guidelines for post-surgical pain management, data collected from acute care hospitals in Wisconsin indicate low compliance with the recommendations.
-
Yes, suggests a recent study in JAMA. As long as efforts to boost use of beta blockers share a few key ingredients, the particular structure of a QI effort doesn't seem to make a difference in reaching the desired goal.
-
Data Strateg Benchmarks · Apr 1998
Spider diagram helps hospital cut the fat using clinical quality and patient satisfaction data.
A balancing act: When it became apparent that a 900-bed hospital in Detroit needed to cut costs to stay viable, leaders decided making across-the-board cuts would be as dangerous as making no cuts. Instead, they began measuring four different types of indicators on a new service-line basis using a spider diagram to ensure they were balancing the needs of administration, physicians, patients, and the community.
-
Lab information system is a lean, mean time-tracking machine. Reorganizing around a laboratory information system (LIS) allowed the primary care Chester County (SC) Hospital to develop a model of streamlined efficiency that ranks very favorably against peer benchmarks in terms of productivity and cost-efficiency. Key components are "auto-merge" and "auto-release" features that dramatically speed up lab test processing, but raised eyebrows among clinical lab staff.
-
Data Strateg Benchmarks · Jun 1998
Comparative StudyRegional data on low back pain point to improvement potential.
Data Library: Benchmark your organization's treatment of low back pain. There's wide variation in specialty provider use, utilization of services, and costs of this high-volume medical problem--despite federal guidelines stipulating treatment recommendations. These data are broken out by specialty and on a regional basis.