Comparing hospitals is a way to gain more understanding of the performance and understand the difference in their quality metrics. The region that was selected for comparison was Georgia. The two hospitals that were compared were Advent Health Gordon and Candler Hospital. This discussion analyzes the available quality metrics, the difference in their quality ratings, lessons about the lessons, and improvements that can be made on the data.
There were several different types of quality metrics available. For the hospitals selected, the data included a survey of patients’ experience, timely and effective care, complication & deaths, and unplanned hospital visits. The quality ratings differed significantly from one hospital to the next. The overall rating for Advent Health Gordon was 4 out of 5 while that of Candler was 2 out of 5. Candler had an overall low rating because of its poor score in patient care. For instance, in one of the metrics of nurses always communicating well, Advent Health Gordon scored 84% while Candler Hospital scored 77% (“Compare hospitals”, 2020). The score from the survey of patient experience is important as it showed that if the expectations of patients are being met or are lacking in an area (Parkin et al., 2020). Patient experience is a significant part of a hospital’s service and the health care institution with a poor patient experience is likely to have a poor overall rating.
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The review of the hospitals provided insight into how the different hospitals performed. One surprising thing was the difference in Sepsis complications that take place when one has an extreme response to an infection (Schmutzhard & Pfausler, 2017). Candler Hospital had a very poor score of 35% and this was compared Advent Health Gordon that scored 65%. Another surprising difference was in unplanned hospital visits where Advent Health Gordon scored ‘worse than expected’ in unplanned hospital visits after outpatient surgery while the results of Candler Hospital were ‘no different than expected’.
The performance in the quality metrics can be used as a guideline to improve the delivery of care. For Candler hospital, it was observed that there is a need to improve the patient experience. Data from patient experience showed that most of the patients rated their overall experience to be quite low. Improving patient experience will involve focusing on a clear explanation of medicines, providing help to patients quickly, keeping the rooms and bathrooms clean, and nurses and doctors improving their communication with patients (Jensen et al., 2020). The hospital also had to improve on reducing sepsis complications as the data showed it had scored quite poorly in this area.
References
Compare hospitals . (2020). Medicare. https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/compare.html#cmprTab=1&cmprID=110024%2C110023&cmprDist=0.0%2C0.0&stsltd=GA&dist=25&lat=0&lng=0&state=GA
Jensen, J. D., Allen, L., Blasko, R., & Nagy, P. (2016). Using quality improvement methods to improve patient experience. Journal of the American College of Radiology , 13 (12), 1550-1554. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2016.09.005
Parkin, S., Locock, L., Graham, C., King, J., Montgomery, C., Gibbons, E., ... & Chisholm, A. (2020). Understanding how front-line staff use patient experience data for service improvement: an exploratory case study evaluation. Health Services and Delivery Research , 8 (13). https://doi.org/10.3310/hsdr08130
Schmutzhard, E., & Pfausler, B. (2017). Neurologic complications of sepsis. In Handbook of Clinical Neurology (Vol. 141, pp. 675-683). https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63599-0.00036-3
