Report Finds Hospitals Safer Now than Before Pandemic
November 1, 2024
By Greg Freeman
Hospital and health system performance on key patient safety and quality measures was better in the first quarter of 2024 than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the American Hospital Association (AHA). Additionally, hospitals made these improvements while caring for patients with more significant healthcare needs. The AHA highlights these findings:
- Hospitalized patients in the first quarter of 2024 were on average more than 20% more likely to survive than expected given the severity of their illnesses compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.
- Hospitals’ efforts to improve safety led to 200,000 Americans hospitalized between April 2023 and March 2024 surviving episodes of care they would not have survived in 2019.
- Hospitals cared for more patients overall in the first quarter of 2024 than in the last quarter of 2019, including providing care to a sicker, more complex patient population.
- Hospitals’ central line-associated bloodstream infections and catheter-associated urinary tract infections in the first quarter of 2024 were at rates lower than those recorded in 2019.
- Not only did multiple key preventive health screenings rapidly rebound to pre-pandemic levels, but ongoing improvement has led to a 60% to 80% increase in breast, colon, and cervical cancer screenings compared to 2019.
The report is available online at https://www.aha.org/guidesreports/2024-09-12-new-analysis-shows-hospitals-performance-key-patient-safety-measures-surpassing-pre-pandemic-levels.
The findings are encouraging, says Akin Demehin, senior director for quality and patient safety with the AHA in Chicago.
“We know that hospitals have really doubled down on things like their infection control practices and implementing rigorous approaches to identifying and preventing infections,” he says. “They’re getting their frontline team engaged in quality improvement and really using the expertise of the frontline to design interventions to make care safer, and they’re beginning, in many ways, to leverage advanced technologies and analytics to prospectively identify safety risks and put processes in place to mitigate them.”
Healthcare leaders should see the data as proof that those efforts work and are worth their investments, he says. The report validates the work that hospitals and health systems are doing to make the care they deliver better and safer, Demehin says.
“Throughout the past several years, and really going back a couple of decades, we’ve seen hospitals build systematic approaches to identifying potential risks to safety, implementing process improvement, data analysis, and tracking to see whether they were making progress and continually reevaluating to understand whether the interventions they’ve put in place have worked,” he says. “In the midst of really a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic where the healthcare system was stressed and strained in ways that were really kind of unimaginable before the pandemic, some of those approaches around really enhancing infection control, advancing screening methods, using data and analytics, helped to get the field through that incredibly difficult time. They even got us to a point where there the safety of care being delivered based on these data is not only back to where it was pre-pandemic, but actually looking better than it was before then.”
The report also helps to give the public a view of what hospital performance looks like, Demehin says. One advantage AHA had in this analysis was access to some data that are not available publicly yet, which Demehin says is just a function of the processing time that it sometimes takes for organizations like CMS to process claims and get them packaged in a way that is ready for public consumption.
“One thing that I will tell you about this is that we’re not considering this a victory lap of any kind. It is incredibly encouraging progress that hospitals have made, and they recognize that there is more work to do,” Demehin says. “Care is constantly changing. The needs of patients and communities are constantly changing, and that’s why hospitals are staying vigilant and continuing their patient safety improvement efforts apace.”
Source
- Akin Demehin, Senior Director Quality & Patient Safety, American Hospital Association, Chicago: Telephone: (312) 422-3000.
Greg Freeman has worked with Relias Media and its predecessor companies since 1989, moving from assistant staff writer to executive editor before becoming a freelance writer. He has been the editor of Healthcare Risk Management since 1992 and provides research and content for other Relias Media products. In addition to his work with Relias Media, Greg provides other freelance writing services and is the author of seven narrative nonfiction books on wartime experiences and other historical events.
Hospital and health system performance on key patient safety and quality measures was better in the first quarter of 2024 than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the American Hospital Association.
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