The Nebraska Hospital Association HIIN recently received the American Hospital Association Performance Improvement Award based on the exemplary improvement achieved on the American Hospital Association/Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) Hospital Improvement Innovation Network (HIIN) program.
“This award speaks not only to the outstanding efforts by our NHA HIIN staff; Dana Steiner and Andrea Cramer-Price; but, most importantly, to the hospitals and their quality leaders who are giving excellent patient care and making sure their data tells that story effectively,” remarked Margaret Woeppel, VP Quality Initiatives for the Nebraska Hospital Association.
Nebraska hospital quality leaders have been tackling progressively more difficult CMS driven metrics in the quest for safe patient care. HRET-HIIN has tasked our member hospitals with reducing patient harm by 20% and readmissions by 12 percent as evidence of 90 percent of hospitals submitting complete data on a monthly basis and demonstrating improvement in 70 percent of applicable measures.
In the past year, the focus has been on:
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- increased transparency
- implementation of a statewide rural QI residency program
- publishing best practices related to opioid management
- providing an easy to access resource database
- developing appropriate communication and touchpoints between hospitals and NHA staff
“We should all be very proud of the hospitals involved in the Nebraska Hospital Improvement and Innovation Network. They are working to improve outcomes by focusing on key data driven metrics to prevent harm, provide outstanding quality care, and focus on patient safety. I commend these hospitals for reporting and being transparent in their improvement efforts,” shared Tammy Wagner, RN, LSSGB, CADDCT, CDP; Quality Improvement Advisor with Great Plains QIN.
In the upcoming year, in addition to running rapid improvement programs on HIIN designated metrics, the NHA HIIN looks forward to specific work on a culture of patient safety, sepsis, transitions of care, violence, patient family engagement and disparities. Learn more.