Posting Quality Indicators - What’s Your Take?
Written March 26th, 2008 by Aaron HolbrookI’ve been asked to do a little digging into what other hospitals are doing to present their quality indicators to the public.
Thus far I’ve only seen a handful of sites, Norton being one of the first and most prominent.
Has anyone else jumped ahead of the curve and gotten their arms around this beast?
I think one of my main problems is going to be lassoing the quality department into using a database (currently they are using Word documents to store most of this data). Fortunately, they are more than willing to learn a new process in order to make this project a reality.
What are some of the biggest hurdles that you’ve faced? How have you handled displaying the data in a format that’s easy to read but still informative? How did you make it easy to get to from the home page?
March 26th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Hi! I work at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH. We have a very extensive quality & cost reporting website . Currently we use Excel to upload the data onto the site. We are in the process of a redesign and are looking at switching to Access.
Regardless of how you get info up onto the site, I think the key is to do user testing with your audience (e.g. patients & families) both for content and usability. They will be your best barometer for telling you how well you’re meeting those goals.
Biggest hurdle… ahhh, where to begin… It’s a big challenge for us to have the whole website (and data gathering) as a manual process. This is something Norton has worked out better. We have a tremendous number of data streams and analysis that needs to happen. The other big challenge for us was to convince clinicians that our leadership supported our committment to show “the good with the bad”. If you look at our site, you’ll see that it’s not fabulous results. We have room for improvement! We have gotten feedback from patients that they actually like this… it creates trust that we’re willing to share our results (the implied end of the statement is that we’re not just using this for promoting services).
To make it easy to find from our home page, we have a tabbed setup at the top of every page on the website… so users can always click to Quality Reports. We also link specific Quality Reports from clinical program pages.
Hope this is helpful. Good luck!
March 26th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Thanks Elissa! I definitely agree (and have even heard from our quality team) that putting everything up there is the best idea. Not only does it help promote trust between the patient and hospital, but it also is a great motivator for departments to get their scores up. So, initially may not be so hot, but should definitely be a great way for people to show how well they’ve improved.
I definitely like the easy to find top tab for the quality reports. If you did any user testing - did you find that most people knew what “Quality Reports” meant? Or did people skip the link because they were unfamiliar with the term?
March 26th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
We’re in the midst of revisiting the quality section of our site. I’ll send out the link when we go live with it, in 6-8 weeks, optimistically.
The challenge of communicating “quality” on a consumer-facing site is that it’s become over-burdened as a health care concept. It means everything from how someone answers the phone in a department, to specific clinical measures regarding heart attack.
As content person, my goal for the section is to clearly articulate what quality means in a health care context—patient satisfaction, clinical measures, and patient safety—and, most importantly, how patients benefit. In addition to better customer service, the end result of quality initiatives should be reduced chance of infection and hospital-acquired illness, shorter hospital stays, quicker recoveries, etc. In short, better outcomes. We have to do a better job communicating this to our patients, and prospective patients.
I can’t address the quality data-handling aspects of our site design, but know that we’re trying to make the graphs more patient-friendly. The graphs and data are accompanied by brief explanatory texts.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:21 am
We actually just launched ver 1.0 of our quality section at Duke Health.
http://dukehealth.org/quality
We had buy-in from the very top of our org, which made getting this data online much simpler than a typical project, though. Our plan is to roll out a ver 2.0 based on user testing, better design, etc.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Nice job Bart - it looks good. Although how do you import this? Is it on an automatic type of system - or do you have to redraw your charts every quarter (or however often you have updates)?
March 28th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I’m the Website Coordinator for Covenant Health in Knoxville TN and we’ve had our quality info online for a good while now:
http://www.covenantquality.com
March 28th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Yup. We launched quality measures in September of 2007:
http://www.memorialhealthsystem.com/wps/wcm/connect/MH/Main+Navigation/About+Us/Quality+Measures/
It’s a high traffic area for us, too. On par with Find a Doctor and Classes & Events.
March 28th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
We haven’t ventured out just yet, but one of the better quality site examples I’ve seen is http://www.nch.org/metrics/.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:06 pm
@Aaron:
We currently get this data as PDF and hand create the graphs. In a few months we’re going to automate it by getting a custom XLS spreadsheet each quarter, and the graphs will be Flash generated. We’ll likely use this tool for the graphs:
http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/
March 31st, 2008 at 3:54 pm
We also have our quality info up:
http://www.aurorahealthcare.org/aboutus/quality/default.aspx
It’s available from anywhere on the site under the drop-down for About Us. Truth be told, most patients don’t understand or care about this information. The data suggests that they define “quality” as the kinds of things that were in last week’s HCAHPS announcement, or the cost of their service.
But we’re big believers in the quality indicators, so we put them out there. I’d love to get to the point where we include the patient satisfaction data and our pricing information. Dartmouth-Hitchcock does it right!
April 4th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I’ve been working on the quality/transparency initiative at our health system since last summer. So far, we have released patient satisfaction scores and some process of care measures. Next month we will be releasing mortality, infection and hand washing data. Most of this is ajax/xml-based at the moment, with me entering the scores manually every quarter. Later this year I will move toward a more database driven model that will be easier to deal.
My findings have been similar to Neal’s. We have put a lot of energy and debate into this project but so far the visitor traffic has been disappointing. “Quality” to a patient has more to do with customer service than outcome. On the positive side it is nice to see our executives and doctors make a commitment that puts their skin in the game.
April 7th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
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April 8th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
We released our quality scores last year and used Norton as our guide. You may view it here:
http://www.mymethodist.net/about/qualityreports/quality_report_welcome.aspx
Since then I’ve realized a need to adjust how we are currently displaying our scores. The tables displaying the content stay the same pretty much from quarter to quarter. Just the number and the description are updated. The current process is manual and very time consuming for my quality department and for myself. We include a description including what the score means to the patient, but I’d like to see more. I don’t believe the information as it is currently displayed is as intuitive or patient friendly as it could be. We also started posting costs last year for some procedures on the web site last year; however, they’re buried in with the procedure information. I will be working with my CMS vendor to improve the quality reports and how the information is displayed. We’ll be adding more information about the score, the procedure, and including cost information along with the quality data. We include our patient satisfaction data along with our quality reports. We also include our Immediate Care facilities and our physician offices as a whole. My CEO would like to see data broken down by individual physician; however, I don’t believe we will get to that point until absolutely necessary. One thing I was surprised to see was the amount of traffic this area gets. I wasn’t expecting it to get any, but our reports indicate it is one of the higher traffic areas of the site.
@Bart - the flash generated graphs are niiiiice.