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Tip of the Week: Three cost-effective ways to improve quality

Accreditation Connection, June 27, 2005

Missi Halvorsen, RN, BSN, the Jacksonville, FL-based Baptist Medical Center's senior JCAHO and regulatory accreditation consultant, suggests these three cost-effective strategies to improve quality:

1. Use standardized orders:

Writing standardized orders into all discharge instructions is one of the most reliable ways to improve your organization's adherence to the quality measures that CMS will tie to Medicare reimbursement, says Halvorsen.

When built into your processes, standardized orders also help remind physicians about simple details they might forget, such as offering smoking-cessation counseling or prescribing aspirin or antibiotics before the patient moves from the ED to a patient care unit.

2. Do a walk-through:

Looking at a unit from the patient's point of view can help staff identify lapses in quality and patient safety, says Halvorsen.

Consider recruiting a nonclinical person, such as someone who works in the finance or maintenance departments, to walk through each unit looking for quality concerns.

Halvorsen recalls one maintenance manager calling attention to waiting areas being referred to as "waiting rooms." He suggested that the hospital call them "family areas" instead because the term "waiting room" causes patients and families to feel inferior and powerless.

3. Tweak your patient-satisfaction surveys:

Most surveys ask patients to rate the care they received. While that's helpful for high-level benchmarking purposes, it doesn't provide the kind of personal feedback that organizations need to make point-of-care improvements, says Halvorsen.

With that in mind, a more useful patient-satisfaction survey should ask questions that generate more specific feedback, such as:

 did you feel prepared to leave the hospital and care for yourself?
 do you understand when and how to take your medication?

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