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Porter Hospital Sees Improvement in 2010 CMS Quality Indicator Scores

Tuesday March 16, 2010

   During the first five months of its current fiscal year, Porter Hospital has recorded significant improvements in its “Core Quality Measures” scores for the major diagnostic groups reported annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

   Since 2005, CMS has been collecting data from hospitals throughout the United
States on 31 “Quality Measures” and publishing this data annually in order to “provide information to consumers and encourage hospitals and physicians to improve quality of care” according to their web site.  These 31 indicators are  divided into four groups or “core measures” that have gained widespread public attention in recent years, as they are generally reported to the media on a state-by-state basis each spring.  These four core measures are: Surgical Care Infection Prevention, Community Acquired Pneumonia Care, Congestive Heart Failure Care and Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) Care.

   Although Porter Hospital has had only one patient during the current fiscal year
who met the clinical criteria for the AMI Quality Indicator given the limited number of patients who would receive these services in a small community hospital, Porter’s scores for the other three indicators are 100% (Surgical Care Infection Prevention), 100% (Congestive Heart Failure) and 90% (Community Acquired Pneumonia).  These scores reflect how well an individual hospital performs in “meeting specific goals for a variety of individual care components based on nationally accepted standards of care and current evidence for best clinical practice”, according to Pat Jannene, Vice President for Patient Care.

   “We are extremely gratified by the results this fiscal year in our quality indicators
scores that are a direct result of the hard work by our nurses, physicians and other clinical staff who have worked together to review and improve our processes of care”, she said.  “These measures focus on how well we document the specific procedures and treatments within these diagnostic categories, and we have provided education, developed new processes, established concurrent reviews and redeployed staff resources to positively affect change and improve our results”, she said.

   The initiatives that led to these most recent positive results were launched nearly
a year ago, when the CMS indicator data for 2008 showed that Porter Hospital had not scored as well as other Vermont hospitals on these four core measures relative to documentation and performance.  Although these new programs and efforts were developed and implemented within weeks of the release of the 2008 scores, most of the data for the 2009 scores had already been collected due to the significant “lag time” between the collection and reporting of this data.  Thus, the improved quality indicator scores for fiscal year 2010 will not be published until the spring of 2011. 

   “Every member of our clinical staff was disappointed by the 2008 scores, and we
realized that by the time we became aware of these results, most of the data for 2009 had already been submitted”, Jannene said.  “Therefore, we decided that it was going to be one of our highest priorities for 2010 to ensure that any quality indicator scores for Porter Hospital are a true indication of the outstanding care we provide each and every day”, she said.

   “We thought that it was important to share with our community the most current
information available and demonstrate the significant improvements we are now
seeing across the board in these publicly reported quality measures”, said Dr. Ben Rosenberg, President of the Porter Hospital Medical Staff and a member of the Porter board.  “Given the lag time in the reporting by CMS on a national level, we wanted to share with our local community the data for fiscal year 2010 and all of the new resources that have been put into place to maintain these positive outcomes in the future”, he added.

   Looking further ahead, CMS plans to continue to add new quality measures that will capture results related to outpatient services and radiology services.  “Now that we have built up the infrastructure and our internal resources to respond to these new requirements as they come down the road, we feel that our data will continue to demonstrate our long standing commitment to providing the highest
evel of quality care for all of our patients”, Jannene said.
                       

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