10 quality measures hospital leaders must emphasize

To deliver the highest quality care possible, healthcare leaders and board members must focus on 10 key metrics.

The measures were deemed the most useful to healthcare executives surveyed by Press Ganey and included in a new whitepaper:

  • Inpatients’ rating of nurse communication
  • Inpatients’ rating of physician communication
  • Inpatients’ rating of whether staff worked together to care for them
  • Inpatient likelihood to recommend according to Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey ratings
  • Employee likelihood to recommend their organization to family and friends
  • Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems/Medical Practice survey ratings’ likelihood to recommend
  • Serious safety event rate
  • All-cause 30-day readmissions throughout the hospital
  • Employees’ ranked responses to the statement “I would feel safe being treated as a patient here”
  • 30-day mortality rates

“The dynamics of our industry, including increasing competition and consumerism, demand that boards and their executives manage based on an expanded set of quality metrics that contemplate much more than financial performance,” the whitepaper states. “Data show that safety, quality and the experience of care are related and impact outcomes as well as financial performance. Our belief is that the short but diversified set of metrics in the Board Quality Report Card presented here will advance performance initiatives more effectively in the challenging days ahead.”

Determining the most effective quality measures is vital in healthcare, particularly for patient satisfaction; recent research indicates the sheer volume of available hospital rankings and measures from various sources are often contradictory and confusing for patients, FierceHealthcare previously reported.