BSSM St. Mary’s Good Samaritan attains strategic goals with QUEST

Situation:

The 157 hospitals participating in Premier’s voluntary QUEST® collaborative were challenged to overcome process failures and excessive costs to achieve top performance by measuring themselves against one another on the following goals:

• Achieve mortality rate 18 percent less than expected (observed/expected = 0.82)
• Safely reduce inpatient costs below the midpoint among participating hospitals
• Deliver every recommended evidence-based care measure – sometimes called “perfect care” – for patients at least 84 percent of the time

When SSM St Mary’s Good Samaritan, St. Mary’s Campus in Centralia, IL, began its QUEST journey, it had opportunities in all three categories on both campuses.

Solution:

• Began collecting and cataloging “best” practices from organizations with performance levels that St. Mary’s Good Samaritan wanted to achieve; master list of change concepts is used when gaps and areas for improvement are identified.
• Used ClinicalAdvisor^® to identify opportunities and as guide for focused physician performance evaluations to drive specific improvements.
• Established a QUEST steering team that met monthly for overall collaborative management; determined if the right staff was involved.
• Developed QUEST teams that meet weekly initially then biweekly to study opportunities to drive improvements and implement best practices from other QUEST participants or the Premier Performance Improvement Portal™.
• Developed CQI teams focused on improvement opportunities.
• Worked with team that implements OperationsAdvisor^®, Premier’s labor management product, to identify human resource savings; a site visit identified contract labor as an opportunity.
• QUEST goals naturally align with strategic goals: exceptional patient care, exceptional financial performance and exceptional patient satisfaction. Learnings from QUEST were incorporated into action plans and annual operational plans.
• The collaborative learning environment helped focus, align and accelerate benchmarking and improvement efforts that are making a difference for patients.
• A short-term inpatient hospice was new; using it as an end-of-life tool was a significant learning from QUEST.

Results:

At the start of the QUEST collaborative, St. Mary’s Good Samaritan had opportunities at both hospitals to improve on the three goals. The ideals of the QUEST collaborative have been incorporated into the strategic planning process so the goals of QUEST and the organization are well-aligned. Improvements have been significant.

• In evidence-based care, the hospitals are getting stars. They are much better than the initial thresholds. They are not at the new top quartile (QUEST goals continue to evolve upward), but have surpassed the original goal of 84 percent.
• The mortality ratio at St. Mary’s exceeds the .82 goal at .77; at Good Samaritan, the mortality ratio has improved about 25 percent from 1.27 to 1.03 year-to-date, with more recent results closer to the .82 goal with scores in the .80 range. It’s just a matter of time for those results to catch up.
• The two hospitals are performing better than threshold for finance.

"QUEST has been an absolutely positive experience for our organization. It is well-aligned with our internal initiatives and has helped us to continue to be more focused on key results. With increased access to additional resources and the opportunity to network with some of the nation’s best performers, we learned fresh ideas about what to do differently. Through QUEST we have a common metric for desired outcomes. We know what we’re trying to achieve. The knowledge sharing aspect has been especially valuable – the collaborative improvement approaches are definitely working for us by opening doors with other participants for benchmarking. The hardest part for us this year has been our limitations on travel, but we’re keeping up through ‘sprints’ and the Portal. Those are just lifesavers."

Michelle Darnell
Vice President - Systems Improvement
St. Mary's Good Samaritan Inc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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