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Baystate pioneers successful surgical care strategies

Quality Improvement Monitor, April 13, 2007

Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA, ranks in the top 10% in the country for both antibiotic timing and discontinuation and is 100% compliant with the Surgical Care Improvement Project guidelines for venous thromboembolism.

But that top-notch performance didn't happen overnight. The hospital began its drive to boost quality back in 2002 when it became the first hospital in Massachusetts to take part in a national collaborative to reduce surgical complications.

"As you tried to get the clinicians back at your hospital on board, the collaborative model provided you with the evidence, rationale, and research so you could speak intelligently about what you were asking people to do, why you were asking them to do it, and what the [effect] on patients would be," says Jan Fitzgerald, MS, RN, director for quality and medical management for the division of healthcare quality at Baystate.

Rapid cycle changes helped the hospital boost performance fairly quickly, Fitzgerald says.

"We decided back in 2002, 'OK, we're going to change the way we give antibiotics,' " she says. "So we changed our process, we put it in place, we started it, and we measured it. By the end of that day, we knew it didn't work. So we changed it again."

After several days of experimenting, the hospital finally hit upon a process that did work. Baystate went fairly quickly from having only 11% of its patients getting antibiotics within one hour before surgery to 78%. It now has 97%-100% compliance.

"It's embedded in the culture," Fitzgerald says. "But it took five years."

For more information, click here http://www.hcpro.com/content/68723.cfm

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