Alliance will evaluate clinical excellence
Outcomes, customer service measured together
In what the principals claim is a health care industry first, HealthGrades Inc. and J.D. Power and Associates have formed a strategic alliance to recognize hospitals for excellence in both service and clinical outcomes.
The Distinguished Hospital Performance Program, they say, will cover "the full spectrum of hospital quality issues."
"One issue that has really plagued the health care industry as a whole is that it suffers from a lack of measurable goals," asserts Kerry R. Hicks, president and CEO of Denver-based HealthGrades. "This will offer organizationwide goals to hold out and achieve year after year."
"We have been in business for 35 years, basically bringing the voice of the customer into the industries we serve, helping decision makers to make better decisions, and businesses to do a better job of providing services and improving performance," adds Steven D. Wood, PhD, executive director of the health care division for Westlake Village, CA-based J.D. Power.
Noting his company’s entry into the health care field, Wood observes that "health care is a very large and important industry, and will be increasingly important as the population ages. We know we’ve learned a lot of lessons in other industries — for example, what motivates people to make good decisions about goods and services — and the lessons we’ve learned in other industries can be applied to health care as well."
Integrating with clinical outcomes
In entering the industry, he continues, J.D. Power wanted to make sure it had a good sense of clinical entities.
"HealthGrades provides one of the purest forms of clinical evaluations in terms of looking at outcomes," Wood notes. (HealthGrades claims to be the only hospital-quality consulting company that rates all 5,000 hospitals in the United States and publishes the data on its web site.)
"We wanted to have a partner that not only managed that area, but that could integrate its experience with clinical outcomes [with ours in customer service] to provide organizations with the information that in terms of their performance it was important they be linked," Wood explains.
"The evidence suggests that the more satisfied people are with what is being done, the more likely they are to be compliant; this motivates very good behaviors, which probably means we have a good chance to improve outcomes," he says.
In measuring the clinical excellence portion of the program, HealthGrades evaluates clinical quality on a national basis across 20 procedures and diagnoses in six clinical specialties: cardiac surgery, cardiology, orthopedic surgery, neuroscience, pulmonary, and vascular surgery.
HealthGrades statistically aggregates the service-line ratings to create a hospitalwide evaluation of quality. Full-service hospitals that score among the top 20% nationwide are eligible for a HealthGrades Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence award.
Since HealthGrades has been rating hospitals for five years, "We’ve already received all of our data," notes Hicks.
HealthGrades regularly has been providing Hospital Report Cards, which offer star ratings of from one (poor) to five (best) stars. "We took the top 20%, which came to 163 hospitals," says Hicks. The winners were to be announced at the end of April.
Five core concepts
How will J.D. Power measure customer service?
"We did exhaustive secondary research on how that should be measured in the hospital and came up with what we felt was the essence of the experience — what really motivates people to make their selection and to be an advocate," says Wood. The company identified these five core concepts:
- Information and communication.
What is it about the service provided that reduces anxiety and helps the patient understand what is happening? - Dignity and respect.
"In our analysis of many industries, people have a strong need for courtesy and respect. They want to be treated as a person, not just as a case or a test," Wood explains. - Physical comfort.
Patients know that while they are in the hospital there may be some discomfort, but they want to know if the organization is dedicated to minimizing that discomfort, including pain management, to make the experience as comfortable as is reasonably possible. - Emotional support.
Does the individual truly have the feeling he or she is being cared for and that the caregiver is compassionate? - Speed and efficiency.
The patient does not have the feeling his care is being disturbed by inefficiencies in the process, or that he is kept waiting an unreasonable length of time. "We have done a large national study of recently discharged patients and asked them a significant number of questions based on these five core concepts," says Wood.
"We will offer hospitals the opportunity to be benchmarked against this study. If they submit a group of recently discharged patients and achieve a high rating level, we will designate them as a Distinguished Hospital for Provider Excellence," he adds.
Improving quality
What do the partners hope to achieve? "Our goal is to improve the overall quality of health care delivered on behalf of the nation’s hospitals," says Hicks. "We will be setting a quality benchmark, both from a clinical and patient experience perspective. The winners will represent a world-class level of quality."
"Our partnership is unique, in that we will integrate HealthGrades’ data with regard to top clinical outcomes and ours, which we hope will take health care quality to the next level," adds Wood. "The bottom line is that we want people to understand that those who achieve this award are truly committed to quality care."
It also is an opportunity for employees to be recognized for this achievement, which will improve morale and, as a result, their level of care, Wood adds.
"We believe they will pay continued attention to wanting to do their jobs with distinction; it’s a very prideful thing," he concludes.
Need More Information?
- Steve Wood, Executive Director, Health Care Division, J.D. Power and Associates, Westlake Village, CA. Telephone: (480) 344-4804. E-mail: [email protected].
- HealthGrades, Lakewood, CO 80228. Telephone: (303) 716-0041. Web site: www.healthgrades.com.
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content