TN facility drops sepsis mortality deviation by 50%, reduces LOS
For more information
Call the Informatics Solution Center at 800.805.4608 or e-mail
InformaticsSolutionCenter@
Premierinc.com
Maury Regional Medical Center (MRMC) is a 275-bed not-for-profit facility located in Columbia, TN. Established in 1953, MRMC has a medical staff of more than 185 physicians, representing more than 30 specialties, and serves approximately 260,000 residents in southern Middle Tennessee with affiliate facilities in Spring Hill, Hohenwald, Lewisburg and Waynesboro. MRMC won one of 23 Premier Awards for Quality given by the Premier healthcare alliance in June 2009. www.mauryregional.com.
Situation:
Data from Premier Quality Manager helps medical center identify sepsis as the greatest opportunity for clinical improvement.
Solution:
A multidisciplinary team – including pharmacy, respiratory therapy, care management, finance, coding, frontline nurses and physicians – developed programs and processes to reduce the mortality rate and deviation for patients with sepsis.
- Implemented standardized evidence-based best practices and measured using Quality Manager’s Select Practice reports.
- The team and physician champions, passionately driven to make a difference in quality of care, used the information to make changes in practice that resulted in better outcomes.
- Two nurses from Premier supported the project.
- A six-person committee analyzed reports and took summaries to physicians for input.
- Quality Manager experts were on-site for three days to work with a 12-member team.
- Developed tools for standardizing identification of sepsis patients.
- Wide-ranging education directed at physicians and staff.
- Nurses educated to call on a rapid response team for assessments if they felt the signs of sepsis were present but were not being attended to quickly enough.
Result:
Eight months after initiation of a sepsis clinical improvement process, mortality deviation decreased significantly and the return on investment showed dramatic results.
Clinical improvements include:
- Reducing mortality deviation by 50 percent
- Reducing length of stay by 0.3 day
- Increasing lives saved
- Increasing revenue per case for the sepsis patient population
- Improved identification and coding has contributed to a revenue increase of $244,000
"We had nothing comparable until we acquired Quality Manager. We looked far and wide to find a product that would give everyone the expected benefits and be reliable and dependable so physicians would buy in. . . . We found that by identifying sepsis patients earlier and calling them sepsis rather than UTI or pneumonia, then not only did we give them more aggressive care earlier with better outcomes, but we experienced a $6,000 difference in reimbursement from Medicare for sepsis versus UTI."
Brenda Hogan, RN,
Care and Outcomes Coordinator
Maury Regional Medical Center