PA health network's quality awards drive QUEST performance gains
St. Luke's Hospital & Health Network, Bethlehem, PA, is a not-for-profit, regional, integrated network comprised of hospitals, physicians and other related organizations providing care primarily in Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, Schuylkill, Bucks, Montgomery, Berks and Monroe counties in Pennsylvania. Nationally recognized for excellent quality care, the network includes more than 150 locations, including four hospitals, 44,000 annual admissions, 1,224 physicians, 7,000-plus employees and more than 1,200 volunteers. www.mystlukesonline.org
Challenge:
An important part of any healthcare organization’s drive to improve quality is recognition of those who come up with new ideas and who do the work.
Solution:
In 2008, St. Luke’s Hospital and Health Network resumed its Quality Awards program. Awards are presented during a week-long celebration of quality during National Health Care Quality Week in October. The highlight of the week is the Quality Awards ceremony. As many as 10 quality improvement teams may be recognized with first and second places in each of the network’s Five Points of the Star: quality, safety, people, growth and finance, which match the goals of Premier’s QUEST®: High Performing Hospitals collaborative. President and CEO Rick Anderson presents the President’s Award for Quality to the team with the most outstanding results. A multidisciplinary, network-wide committee judges entries using an objective criteria-based scoring sheet; employee names are removed from applications.
Results:
- In 2009 there were 36 applications, up from 28 in 2008. The President’s Award winner was the trauma department-medical-surgical unit team for “Optimizing Resource Utilization in Traumatic Brain Injury: The High Observation Trauma (HOT) Unit,” a program to care for low-severity head injury patients on a medical-surgical unit less expensively.
- St Luke’s participates not only in QUEST but also in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID™) collaborative. Half of the eight 2009 winners were projects related to the collaboratives: reducing ventilator-acquired pneumonia, improving core measures, early extubation of open heart surgery patients, and reducing central line-associated bloodstream infections.
- The improving core measures team helped St. Luke's Quakertown campus become a QUEST top performer.
- Six winners were entered in the state hospital association’s annual awards program and won four of 17 awards.
- Most entries become posters for internal and external presentations. A team presented at Premier’s Breakthroughs Conference and Exhibition in 2009 and two will present in 2010.
"Employees want to get the President’s Award; they value the recognition of
their achievements, so they really compete. The awards also dovetail with our
participation in QUEST. The Core Measure team from Quakertown hospital won a St
Luke’s award and a state award. The entry was about processes they put in place
to move to a QUEST top performer."
Donna Sabol
VP of quality/chief quality officer
St. Luke’s Hospital & Health Network
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