Southern Ohio Medical Center was recently honored with a “A” Hospital Safety Score by The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit run by employers and other large purchasers of health benefits. Calculated under the guidance of The Leapfrog Group’s nine-member Blue Ribbon Expert Panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 26 measures of publicly available safety data to produce a single score representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from infections, injuries, and medical and medication errors. For a complete article please click SOMC Awarded a “A” for Patient Safety.
What is The Joint Commission?
The operation of SOMC follows guidelines of The Joint Commission, the nation’s predominant standards-setting body in health care, and SOMC has received top honors from that organization for meeting standards. The Joint Commission accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. It is an independent, not-for-profit organization. Joint Commission accreditation and certification is recognized nationwide as a symbol of quality that reflects an organization’s commitment to meeting certain performance standards.
What is Hospital Compare?
Hospital Compare was created through the efforts of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in order to help you make decisions about where you get your healthcare. Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country. By publicly displaying each hospital’s quality data, it also encourages hospitals to improve the quality of care they provide. At SOMC, we are proud of the quality that we provide to our community, and we encourage you to examine our quality results and compare us to our competitors when making decisions about your healthcare needs.
What information is available on Hospital Compare?
Hospital Compare offers a “snapshot” of quality for hospitals in your area on the following aspects of healthcare:
- Overall Hospital Rating: A summary score expressed in stars, where higher is better, across 7 areas of quality.
- Timely and Effective Care: How often and how quickly each hospital gives recommended treatments for certain conditions like heart attack, sepsis, and emergency department care.
- Readmissions, Complications and Deaths:
- How each hospital’s 30-day readmission and mortality (death) rates for certain conditions compare with the national rate.
- How likely it is that patients will suffer from complications while in the hospital.
- How often patients got certain serious conditions while in the hospital, that might have been prevented if the hospital followed procedures based on best practices and scientific evidence.
- Survey of Patients’ Experiences (HCAHPS): How recently-discharged patients responded to a national survey about their hospital experience. For example, how well their hospital’s doctors and nurses communicate with patients and how well they manage their patients’ pain.
- Payment and Value of Care: Measures the cost of care to Medicare beneficiaries.
Further information about these measures and CMS’ quality programs can be found at qualitynet.org.
How do I navigate the Hospital Compare website?
http://hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ -From the Hospital Compare home page, you will be able to perform a search by location (using Zip code or City, State). This will give you a list of facilities within 50 miles of the zip code or city that you entered. Optionally, you may also include a specific hospital name if you would like to look at the quality results of a specific hospital that you have in mind. Once the search is resulted, you may modify your results by increasing your search area beyond 50 miles or search by state or county.
Each facility’s name, distance from your area, hospital type, and availability of emergency services will be displayed. You may select a hospital’s name to target that specific hospital or you can check the box next to two or more hospitals that you would like to compare. If you check two or more facilities’ boxes, select the “Compare Now” button at the top or bottom of the page. This will bring up the before mentioned aspects of healthcare represented as tabs at the top of the page. Each tab will have quality measures with the selected facilities’ results listed side by side for you to directly compare.
If you select “View Graphs,” bar graphs demonstrating the comparative results will be displayed. Additionally, state and national averages will also be displayed next to the facilities’ results for each indicator. Lastly, there is another option to “View Details” which will allow you to view the same information via tables if that is your preference.
Click here to find SOMC’s Hospital Compare Results
What is HCAHPS?
HCAHPS, which stands for Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems, is a government survey for measuring patient satisfaction at hospitals across the country. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) sponsor the survey. Both agencies are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The categories focus on communication with doctors and nurses, responsiveness of hospital staff, pain management, cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment, and instructions about medications and discharge. This information has been publicly available via the Hospital Quality Alliance web site since late March 2008.
At SOMC, as part of our journey to sustained excellence, we continually measure how we compare to hospitals in the region and the nation. In most key quality indicators of excellence, SOMC ranks among the top 10 percent of hospitals in the United States. Strategic value dashboards facilitate management by fact and enhance organizational alignment with SOMC’s strategic values and plan. As part of SOMC’s continued mission to make a difference by providing excellent care, we are embarking on a journey to deliver perfect care to every patient every time.
FY2020
At the end of each fiscal year, our Strategic Value Reports are posted. They contain our results and data from the previous fiscal year of July to June.