A new HealthGrades report on patient safety and satisfaction rates in hospitals across the country finds that hospitals with the highest patient ratings for physician and nursing communications on average have had fewer problems with patient safety issues.
HealthGrades, a provider of healthcare information for consumers, analyzed patient safety data for hospitalizations between 2008 and 2010. Researchers found that better communication among staff members led to fewer surgical inpatient deaths with treatable complications, pressure ulcers and post-operative respiratory failure and sepsis, among other issues.
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Some of the key findings in the report include:
• 15 percent more overall patient safety events occurred in hospitals performing in the bottom 10 percent for physician communication, compared to those in the top 10 percent.
• 27 percent more overall patient safety events occurred in hospitals performing in the bottom 10 percent for nursing communication, compared to the top 10 percent.
• 13 percent more patients at hospitals performing in the top 10 percent for patient satisfaction reported they received instructions on what to do when they left the hospital, compared to the bottom 10 percent.
“I think, given that there’s a lot of movement towards pay for performance for hospitals with healthcare reform coming and the fact that there’s been a large question about whether patient experience is a good measure of quality or not, the most important finding is that there’s a link between patients perception of communication and patient safety events,” said study author Kristin Reed, vice president of clinical quality programs at HealthGrades. “What this means for hospitals is that we need to do a better job of really pulling information out of patients. Just because someone isn’t saying anything doesn’t mean he or she understands everything we’ve told them – it can mean the difference between having a serious patient safety issue or not.”
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HealthGrades conducted the analysis as part of its process for identifying the HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award and HealthGrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award recipients.
To identify the best-performing hospitals in patient safety, which represent the top 5 percent of all U.S. hospitals, HeathGrades analyzed approximately 40 million Medicare hospitalizations in 5,000 hospitals from 2008 to 2010. The analysis was conducted using a method developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to calculate event rates for 13 indicators of patient safety.
Based on the data, HealthGrades estimates 254,000 patient safety events among Medicare patients could have been prevented, and 56,367 Medicare patients who died experienced one or more of these events.
“While we didn’t look at costs in the study, we have in the past, and we know that patient safety events are significant cost drivers for hospitals,” said Reed. “So preventing these events could have a significant impact on a hospital’s bottom line.”
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