Hospital Compare: Roadmap to Excellence

The Problem
Flowers wanted to improve its performance on the 28 quality measures that are featured on the Hospital Compare Web site. The hospital's CEO, Keith Granger, made it an organizational goal to get performance 'as close to perfection as we can get.'
The Solution
Granger made improvement in publicly reported quality measures a focus of the hospital's strategy in 2005. From there, the solution became multifaceted as separate teams tackled the main categories of Hospital Compare measures: heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care and mortality. The teams were overseen by a multidisciplinary group called the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), an internal group that addresses issues around Hospital Compare (not to be confused with the national public private collaboration of the same name). Flowers' HQA includes team leaders, the chief quality officer and representatives from surgical specialties, anesthesiology, pharmacy, surgical floor nursing and management. The group meets every two weeks to discuss the latest numbers and process changes, and the team leader reports to the CEO once a month to present all the cases that kept a measure from hitting 100 percent.

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