ClinicalAdvisor® enhances mortality analysis, focused MD evaluations
St. Mary’s Good Samaritan Inc. serves approximately 230,000 people in a nine-county area. As one of the largest healthcare organizations in southern Illinois, St. Mary’s Good Samaritan Inc. is made up of two regional hospitals – St. Mary’s Hospital (180 beds) in Centralia and Good Samaritan Regional Health Center (154 beds) in Mt. Vernon – as well as more than 120 active physicians, eight family health centers and several specialty programs. St. Mary's Good Samaritan is sponsored jointly by SSM Health Care and Chicago-based Felician Services Inc.
Situation:
As a participant in Premier’s voluntary QUEST® collaborative, SSM St. Mary’s Good Samaritan was challenged to improve mortality, deliver recommended evidence-based care measures and safely reduce inpatient costs. Hospital data were needed to analyze and to discover opportunities for improvement.
Solution:
ClinicalAdvisor® was fundamental to that process, allowing benchmarking with top performers and prioritization of quality improvement. It provided actionable information such as detailed comparative clinical outcome measures, and transaction-level patient and cost data.
"ClinicalAdvisor has been critical to the success of QUEST.
We could not have completed our mortality opportunity analysis without CA.
We have one person dedicated to CA. I posed many questions to her to learn
where variation was occurring. I can’t tell how many reports were run when we
started in QUEST, looking for opportunities. I took the data and summarized
the opportunities and combined that with what we had learned from the early
collaborative sessions. We brought down our mortality relatively quickly
and easily by working on sepsis and developing a sepsis order set, working on
palliative care documentation, and implementing a short-term inpatient hospice.
We really haven’t talked about QUEST with our doctors in a special framework.
We have incorporated the concepts of the QUEST collaborative into our strategic
planning process. They know, for example, that mortality is an area of emphasis.
They have been receiving reports about mortality with areas for improvement,
information about what we could/should do differently and how they can be involved.
In cases where a physician is a statistical outlier, we use reports from ClinicalAdvisor
to help guide the peer review process for focused performance evaluations to
discover opportunities for improvement."
Michelle Darnell
Vice President - Systems Improvement
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