Virginia’s local hospitals and health systems are dedicated to delivering positive patient outcomes by providing high quality care to all they serve.
Achieving those goals requires commitment, vigilance, and self-assessment to identify opportunities for improvement. To help with that process, the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association (VHHA) maintains Quality & Patient Safety Scorecards – an interactive, online tool that enables users to review data showing hospital-specific performance on key quality, safety, and patient satisfaction measures.
The latest data reflected in the scorecards show statewide improvement in 13 categories measuring performance on reducing readmissions after treatment for certain heart conditions or hip and knee replacements, infection prevention, patient satisfaction, and other measures.
The scorecards have been developed with support from VHHA’s Board of Directors that is comprised of leaders from hospitals and health systems across Virginia. A report card for each local hospital in Virginia is available for review by visitors to www.vhha.com. Each scorecard provides information about health care-associated infections – catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) and central lineassociated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) – patient safety, hospital readmission rates, mortality data, patient satisfaction, and efficiency of Medicare spending per beneficiary.
The report cards chart changes in categorical performance from 2010-2015, and list the data source for each category.
The scorecards are one example of how Virginia’s local hospitals and health systems promote transparency and educate the public in the name of promoting a healthier Virginia. VHHA has developed online Community Health Legislative Dashboards which enable users to review key health and population statistics by region throughout the Commonwealth.
The dashboards feature demographic data and statistical health markers corresponding to communities overlapping Virginia’s 100 House of Delegates districts and its 40 state Senate districts. And VHHA maintains an updated PricePoint website that allows visitors to review demographic, quality, and charge information on Virginia hospitals to promote consumer awareness enabling patients to make informed decisions about their health care.
VHHA President and CEO Sean Connaughton said Board-approved efforts to chart hospital performance in key areas, and the fact that improvement is occurring in Virginia hospitals already highly-rated on patient satisfaction measures, underscores hospitals’ commitment to excellence.
“Virginia’s local hospitals and health systems work constantly to improve their operations and openly communicate with the public about how health care works,” said Connaughton. “It is gratifying to see across-the-board improvement in the latest scorecard data. VHHA’s members are jointly working to make Virginia the healthiest state in the nation by 2020. One step in that process is finding areas where hospitals can enhance what they do each day – treat patients. We all have a stake in ensuring Virginia has a strong, stable health care system for our economy, health care access, and public well-being. Using data to chart hospital performance, community health markers and disparities, and health care pricing are among the ways hospitals are demonstrating support for enhancing health care for all Virginians. All this data is available for public use and we encourage people to explore our online tools.”
The Quality & Patient Safety Scorecard function is a fixture on VHHA’s website, as are the PricePoint and the Community Health Legislative Dashboard tools.
The scorecard tool gathers data from sources including the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Virginia Health Information, and the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey.
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