Hoping to build consensus around a single, well-defined set of methods of assessment, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers have proposed a set of guidelines for rating hospital safety measures. The standards, which draw the Users' Guide to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, come from the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. The group's objective is to help the industry avoid the major inconsistencies which currently exist in patient safety reporting. Often, they note, hospital safety reports may use different sample sizes, risk adjustment techniques and measures of statistical confidence, making it virtually impossible to compare their performance.
The guidelines propose about 30 questions that help evaluate the value of a hospital's patient safety measures, including whether the measures are important, valid, useful in improving safety and supported by external evidence. The guidelines are being published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
To learn more about the guidelines:
- read this HealthDay News piece
- read this Johns Hopkins press release
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