Quality and Patient Safety
Our goal is to provide the highest quality of care by continuously monitoring and improving our patients' outcomes and experiences.
Measuring the Patient Experience
A key component of a quality program is the measurement of various aspects of the patient experience. After data is gathered and reviewed, changes may be made and the data is checked again for signs of improvement. Certain types of data are measured nationally. We compare ourselves to these measures as the standard of care we expect to exceed. Our program insures that we are always improving, so that we can provide patients the highest quality of care.
There are different types of data and different ways of organizing or categorizing the measures. One way is to use measures that are grouped by where they fall on the continuum of care including screening, diagnosis, treatment planning, treatment, pain management, and end-of-life. Another is by structure, process, and outcome. For example, a structure measure includes staffing, patient volumes, resources availability; a process measure includes the time from diagnosis to treatment, the proportion of patients who use a certain service, pain assessment on every visit, an outcome measure includes the patient's survival to 5 years, re-admission to the hospital, or pain reduction.
Patient Satisfaction
We conduct patient satisfaction surveys on a continual basis so that we know how patients feel about their care and help us to identify issues we may need to address.