Revolutionize your healthcare quality assessment with these 16 metrics. Learn how to track and improve patient care, safety, and satisfaction.
For most organizations, measuring the quality of anything can be difficult. After all, how can you put numbers to a standard of excellence? The healthcare industry has met this challenge by measuring certain outcomes of care to determine quality.
Generally speaking, positive outcomes translate to a high quality of care. This leads to increased funding and business for hospitals. On the other hand, low quality of care increases costs and can put lives at risk.
To guide your organization on how to start focusing on quality improvement and outcomes of care, we’ve collected 16 popular—and useful—measurements you can start tracking tomorrow.
Quality measures are easier to understand when organized into an accepted framework. For the purposes of this article, we’ll reference the popular Institute of Medicine (IOM) Quality Framework. Below are examples of quality measures in healthcare for each of IOM’s three categories, or domains.
These quality control measures relate to reducing medical errors and protecting patients.
Effectiveness measures relate to services based on established medical treatments or knowledge (care that’s been proven to work), efficiency measures focus on avoiding waste (waste of time, resources, or equipment), and timeliness measures evaluate the promptness of services (reducing wait times, eliminating discharge delays, etc.). Many of these are commonly included in larger quality improvement programs, too.
• Arrival to bed: How long a patient waits after being checked in to be placed in a bed.
• Arrival to nurse or physician: How long a patient waits after being checked in to see a provider.
• Arrival to discharge: How long it takes for a patient to be discharged after check in.
There is a chronological flow to this measure, and results provide insight not only into quality of care but also patient satisfaction rates.
This last domain of quality performance measures in healthcare focuses on ensuring the hospital’s services are respectful and responsive to patients' needs, while providing the same high level of care to everyone.
Once you’ve identified which quality and safety measures in healthcare are most important for your facility, you need to figure out how to track those measures so you can improve. With strategy management software like ClearPoint, each department or division within the hospital can create its own scorecard and then tie performance results to the larger organization’s healthcare quality goals. Here’s an example of what that dashboard could look like. For perhaps the first time, you’ll have visibility and alignment across the organization.
You can also leverage the positive results of your healthcare quality measures in marketing initiatives. ClearPoint allows you to share and publish dashboards, and custom reports can be created in a few clicks. It’s easy to include quality measures and results in public-facing collateral, showing where you’re a leader in the industry while attracting donors.
Quality measures are critical to any healthcare facility’s strategic planning because they point to where a facility is excelling, and where it can improve. These measures also tend to drive other measures within organizations because they indicate how a hospital should shift its finances and resources. Once you start measuring quality for your organization, you’ll have the information you need to provide the best care to your community.
Tricia manages our implementation and onboarding team to ensure the success of ClearPoint customers.