quality metrics – The Health Care Blog

The 30-day Readmission Rate: Not a Quality Measure but an Accountability Measure

Feb 14, 2013• 3

By Ashish Jha, MD

Should we hold hospitals accountable for what happens after a patient leaves the hospitals’ doors? A year ago, I thought the answer was no. A hospital’s job was to take care of sick patients, make them better and send them on their way. With more thought and consideration, I have come to conclude that I was probably wrong. It may be perfectly reasonable to hold hospitals accountable for care beyond their walls, but we should be clear why we’re doing it. Readmissions are not a good quality measure – but they may be a very good way to change the notion of accountability within the healthcare delivery system.

The debate around the readmissions measure has come to the forefront because of the CMS Hospital Readmission Reduction Program, which penalizes hospitals for “greater than expected” readmission rates. It has raised the question — does a hospital’s 30-day readmission rate measure the “quality of care” it provides? Over the last three years, the evidence has come in, and to my read, it is unequivocal. By most standards, the readmissions metric fails as a quality measure.

Why do I say that readmissions are a poor measure of hospital quality? First, we have to begin by thinking about what makes a good quality measure. Quality is about the essence of the thing being produced – a good or a service. The job of a car is to get you from place A to place B and a high-quality car may be one that does the job reliably, safely, or maybe even comfortably. The job of a restaurant is to provide a meal that you don’t have to cook — and a high quality restaurant may provide food that is fresh, tasty, or with an attention to service that you enjoy. What is the job of a hospital? When you get sick and require hospital services, a high-quality hospital should give you the right treatments, attend to your needs while you’re there, and make sure nothing bad (i.e. a new nosocomial infection) happens along the way. That’s how we measure hospital quality.

Quality measures for healthcare come in three flavors – structural measures (do you have enough intensivists manning your ICU?), processes measures (did you give the heart attack patient his or her aspirin?) and outcomes measures (did the pneumonia patient die?). The elemental part of both structural measures and process measures is that they have to be tied to an outcome we care about. If having more intensivists in the ICU does not lead to lower ICU mortality (or lower complication rates), we wouldn’t think it’s a particularly good quality measure. We know that giving aspirin to heart attack patients lowers their chances of dying by 25%. We have multiple randomized trials. We don’t need much more evidence. Hospitals that have the right structures in place and reliably deliver the right treatments can reasonably be called high-quality hospitals.

Brainstorming About the Future of Clinical Documentation

Dec 18, 2012• 11

By John Halamka, MD

In 2013, I’m focused on five major work streams:

· Meaningful Use Stage 2, including Electronic Medication Administration Records
· ICD10, including clinical documentation improvement and computer assisted coding
· Replacement of all Laboratory Information Systems
· Compliance/Regulatory priorities, including security program maturity
·Supporting the IT needs of our evolving Accountable Care Organization including analytics for care management

I’ve written about some of these themes in previous posts and each has their uncharted territory.

One component that crosses several of my goals is how electronic documentation should support structured data capture for ICD10 and ACO quality metrics.

How are most inpatient progress notes documented in hospitals today? The intern writes a note that is often copied by the resident which is often copied by the attending which informs the consultants who may not agree with content. The chart is a largely unreadable and sometimes questionably useful document created via individual contributions and not by the consensus of the care team. The content is sometimes typed, sometimes dictated, sometimes templated, and sometimes cut/pasted. There must be a better way.

When the End of Life Is Not.

Dec 20, 2011• 7

By Marya Zilberberg

So begins this New York Times essay by Peter Bach, MD, where he talks about the inadequacy of resource use at the end of life as a policy metric. Now, I am not very fond of policy metrics, as most of you know. So, imagine my surprise when I found myself disagreeing vehemently with Peter’s argument. Well, to be fair, I did not disagree with him completely. I only disagreed with the thesis that he constructed, skillfully yet transparently fallaciously (wow, a double adverb, I am going to literary hell!) Here is what got me.

He describes a case of a middle-aged man who was experiencing a disorganized heart rhythm, which ultimately resulted in dead bowel and sepsis. The man became critically ill, the story continues, but three weeks later he went home alive and well. This, Dr. Bach says, is why end of life resource utilization is a bad metric: if this guy, who had a high risk of dying, had in fact died in the hospital, the resources spent on his hospital care would have been considered wasted by the measurement. And I could not agree more that lumping all terminal resource use under one umbrella of wasteful spending is idiotic. Unfortunately, knowingly or not, Peter presented a faulty argument.

The case he used as an example is not the case. Indeed it is a straw man constructed for the cynical purpose of easy knock-down. When we talk about futile care, we are not referring to this middle-aged (presumably) relatively healthy guy, no. We are talking about that 95-year-old nursing home patient with advanced dementia being treated in an ICU for urosepsis, or coming into the hospital for a G-tube placement because of no longer being able to eat or drink. We are talking about patients with advanced heart failure and metastatic cancer, whose chances of surviving for the subsequent three months are less than 25%. And yes, we are also talking about some middle-aged guy with gut ischemia, sepsis and worsening multi-organ failure whose chances of surviving to hospital discharge are close to nil; but in his case, instead of being clear from the beginning, the situation evolves.