As an indirect inducement to participate, CMS’ Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program begins this October and will penalize hospitals by as much as 1% of their total Medicare billings (increasing to 3% in 2015) for high rates of readmissions related to heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. CMS’ Value-Based Purchasing program also continues to reward and punish hospitals for their performance on core measures and patient satisfaction, with more metrics forthcoming.
Metric Morass
A major challenge to the success of Partnership for Patients will be the ability to formulate and share reliable, uniform patient safety metrics across institutions. The initiative gives each of the 26 HENs the flexibility to tailor their activities to the sites they are mentoring, and there is no clear way of making standardized comparisons of hospital performance across the HENs, Dr. Maynard says.
Metric validity is a crucial component of any QI initiative. And yet, the ability to reliably measure patient harm/adverse event rates at hospitals—and therefore achieving a solid “denominator” baseline with which to track progress—remains elusive. In a recent report, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General noted that hospital incident reporting systems capture only an estimated 14% of the patient harm events experienced by Medicare patients, reporting requirements remain unclear, and hospital staff continue to harbor misperceptions about what constitutes patient harm.2
In what almost sounds like “back to the drawing board,” the report recommended that CMS and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) collaborate to create and promote a list of potentially reportable events for hospitals to use, and that CMS provide guidance to accreditors regarding their assessments of hospital efforts to track and analyze events.
The problem is that voluntary incident reporting systems are only one tool for identifying patient harm. Typically, however, they miss many things that can harm patients and are grossly under-reported. As a result, they need to be used in conjunction with other data sources, such as hospital infection rates, daily safety rounding on hospital units, and patient chart sampling, says Katharine Luther, RN, MPM, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s vice president of hospital portfolio planning and administration.
Another excellent surveillance instrument for capturing a count of possible harm events is a Global Trigger Tool, which samples patient charts to identify aberrant lab values, drug dosages, and other untoward events that might indicate harm, even though they might not easily be recognized as harmful by hospital staff, Luther says.
Warranted Optimism
Despite its aggressive timeline and inherent methodological challenges, Luther says the Partnership for Patients will galvanize and focus hospitals’ patient safety improvement efforts and provide a much-needed framework for implementation.
“We know of organizations that have greatly reduced the incidence of pressure ulcers, and have gone for a year or more with no cases of ventilator-associated pneumonia or central-line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI),” Luther says. “Exemplars like these are out there, so it can be done. Partnership for Patients brings a spotlight and an energy to the issue that will last long beyond the 24 months of this program.”
Chris Guadagnino is a freelance medical writer in Philadelphia.