Benchmarking Essay

Making sure the needs of the patients are met. Making sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to making things better for the patients. Making sure the employees are happy, this will help them to give excellent care to the patients.

Texas Health Harris Methodist–Cleburne is one of the top performers in the country on the surgical care process-of-care measures, often referred to as the "core" or Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) measures. The measures, developed by the Hospital Quality Alliance and reported to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), relate to achievement of recommended treatment in four clinical areas: heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical care. In addition to its high performance on surgical measures, Texas Health is performing in at least the top 15th percentile in these other areas. This case study focuses on Texas Health 's achievement in providing recommended treatment related to surgical care. The hospital has

The surveying process looks at a facilities or organization’s performance in important performance standards. Performance standards for patient safety and rights, treatment and medication safety, and infection control are the main focus. The standards used to evaluate organizations are developed working closely with those people with the best knowledge to develop them, the healthcare experts, providers, and the consumers of the care-the patients.

The secondary issues are lack of clearly defined roles. The physicians’ primary role is to provide patient care; however, the physicians are performing administrative duties such as scheduling clinic coverage and maintaining adequate medical supplies in examination rooms. Such task should be assigned to administrative assistants. Undefined employee roles create problems because some tasks remain unfinished.

Then, they would need to implement core measures and protocols. Continuously track performance and outcomes. Lastly, they can disseminate results to throughout the hospital to increase quality improvement (Cherry & Jacob, 2010).

Benchmarking for clinical performance measurement involves collecting and reporting data on practices’ clinical processes and outcomes. Measuring clinical performance can create buy-in for improvement work in the practice and enables the practice to track their improvements over time. This information should also be used to identify and prioritize improvement goals and to track progress toward those goals. In addition, these data should be used to monitor maintenance of changes already made ("Module 7. measuring," 2013). Benchmarking can also be utilized to do a comparison between other health care organizations, provide areas where training could improve staff functions.

Within the staffing effectiveness report, most data collected indicated a downward linear trend. This downward trend is a positive outcome. However, 4E has an upward linear trend which needs to be improved. The linear trend of nursing hours compared to the number of falls and pressure ulcers indicate an increase in nursing hours do not guarantee drop in falls or pressure ulcers. The performance trends show a gradual increase in the number of falls and pressure ulcers. A closer look is needed to identify reasons for the correlation between greater nursing hours and increased falls. This may be due to a need for increase in nursing staff and limiting the number of hours the nurse can work

Quality of service should be one of the most important and well monitored goals for any medical facility, from your small town family doctor’s office, to nursing and rehabilitation facilities, all the way to large hospital systems. The quality of service provided in a facility doesn’t just affect the patients. Quality of service also affects the bottom line, or whether or not the hospital system is profitable. In order to better access the system’s current quality of service and to devise improvement plans I would need to explore issues that have significant effect on quality of care such as, patient satisfaction and retention, medical errors

The Performance Measurement is a way to either measure or give a understandable value to what has been done compared to what was supposed to be done. It applies to all aspects in the working environment, such as procedures, critical activities and processes. In other words, first you set pre-defined goals and give away tasks and responsibilities to other workers, then at the deadline you can compare the achieved results to what the original goal was at the beginning. It is also useful to evaluate not only the final result, but even all the actions taken to get that particular results and the way the actions have been taken as well.

Hospital data on specific nursing-sensitive indicators can help a facility advance quality patient care and prevent any new adverse events through education, increased staff, acknowledgement, and accountability. The healthcare facility can post these indicators and the data associated with them including location in the facility and staffing numbers. This helps to bring these indicators to a more individual level whether it be per unit or per person. This along with acuities helps to justify the need for larger numbers in staffing. Although facilities would sometimes rather work with minimum staffing allowed, it is necessary to show that with more staff patients are receiving a higher level of quality care. These numbers might reflect this. This data might also compare the number of hospital acquired pressure ulcers with the use of restraints. This might show staff another reason for promoting a restraint free environment. It must be stressed to nursing staff that they have a direct impact on these nursing-sensitive indicators. Nursing staff could be educated on prevention and early detection of any indicators.

Developed By: Edwin C. Darden (director of education law and policy for Appleseed, a law instructor, and managing partner for The Education Advocacy Firm)

Fakih and Jones (2013) really bring home the fact that once you communicate to your colleagues that infection reduction is an organizational priority, the first step to reduce CAUTIs is to implement a Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) developed by Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. This starts with senior leadership commitment, then involves physicians, nurse leaders,

quality of care. It also requires a review of the process of care and changes in the patients

Benchmarking is a powerful tool used to promote continuous improvement of an organization. It enables the decision-makers to realize how much improvement is required to achieve satisfactory performance. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has defined benchmarking as “a measurement tool for monitoring the impact of governance, management and clinical and logistical functions” (as cited in Ettorchi-Tardy, Levif & Michel, 2012). There are four different kinds of benchmarking: internal, external or competitive, functional and generic or best practice. Also, there are several benefits of using benchmarking within healthcare organizations such as improving the quality of patient care, encouraging accountability among providers, improving productivity, yielding greater efficiency, meeting accreditation requirements, etc.

With the expected growth in the allied health sector in the coming years due to increased patient care demands, healthcare organizations in the United State will need to take steps to maintain a high quality of care. These steps will include ways to ensure that well trained staff are hired, adequate new staff on the job training and orientation, continuous review of policies for improvements in safety, care, risk management and quality assurance. In addition to focusing on the integration of the incoming allied health personnel, healthcare organizations are expected to review how care is currently provided, and find new ways to provide care and meet the great increase in demand for care.