We're working very closely with those state associations to reach all of the hospitals
we possibly can across the nation, so that we can help deliverthe best information about
what effectively works to drive down hospital-acquired conditions, and to improve our readmission
rates.
The South Carolina Hospital Association along with over thirty other public and private
sector health care partners in South Carolina have been working for the last five years
through the Every Patient Counts Partnership to improve the quality and safety of care
for every patient in our state.
More recently, we've aligned that work under the national Partnership for Patients, specifically
focused on reducing preventable harm to patients across our state, and reducing readmissions,
and improving care coordination and transition for patients statewide.
There has to be a culture of safety, so we developed this toolkit that has everything
in it, lots of information about what the problems are in terms of patient safety, and
what you can do about them, and then what the Board can expect from the institution
that they are fiduciary for, and how they can drive change to a culture of safety.
We work with a partnership of hospitals and long term care centers, and we're matching
up providers in the acute- and the long-term-care realms, and we're working very specifically
with patients and identified family care partners.
And we're equipping them with the training to use and create their own health record,
their own electronic health management record, that then they take with them to different
sites to build their confidence, their health confidence or their self confidence in their
ability to manage their own chronic conditions, and that's been one of the pieces that's been
missing.
With reducing central-line-associated bloodstream infections, we have seen a sixty-nine percent
reduction.
We're really changing the culture in the operating rooms across the state, and we've seen some
early reductions, about twenty-five percent, in surgical-site infections.
Looking at the cost impact, we have done some measurements as far as it relates to central
line infections, and we’ve seen, just in that one initiative, about a ten million dollar
reduction in cost statewide.
Through this collaboration we've given hospitals tools to do root-cause analysis, and for central-line
infections, catheter-associated infections, we've seen significant -- and by significant
twenty-, thirty-, forty-percent drops in rates over a very short period of time.
It's a matter of how do we take the really great programs and processes that have already
demonstrated their success and bring those to scale and spread them in all settings and
that's powerful and that's different.
We eventually hope to be able to share best practice and create a learning network so
that the participants who have signed up and are attempting to improve, that they can share
their learning experiences and therefore we can then move the dial by improving care and
bending the cost curve.
We're going to move from that provider-centered, volume-driven environment to a patient-centered,
value-driven environment, and what I mean is that value is quality divided by cost,
and as we start to really improve safety, quality will improve, cost will drop, value
will go up, and as a byproduct it will be more patient-centered.
You want to make your care safer, why not take advantage of this important opportunity
to really link with others who have the same goal?
And who have different perspectives, different tools or strategies at their beck, and who
are ready to move with you to improving safety.
I believe that the people that run hospitals or run nursing homes are in that business
because they want to help people.
People pride themselves on that, and I think that the Partnership for Patients and the
goals that have been set out are goals that these organizations will embrace and will
support.
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