1. Commitment to Quality

At St. John’s, quality matters.

Hospitals can vary in the quality of care they provide. A quality ‘measure’ is one way to see how well a hospital is caring for its patients. St. John’s believes quality is also about specific measurable outcomes, patient satisfaction, introduction of advanced technologies and providing support services that truly make a difference to patients.

This year, St. John’s Hospital is participating in a national initiative led by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to improve health care quality and patient safety. Participating hospitals voluntarily report data on how often they provide some of the recommended care to get the best results for most patients.

Heart attack, congestive heart failure and pneumonia are all common illnesses for which adults are hospitalized in the United States. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have identified care quality measures for these three illnesses.

Getting the recommended care for one of these three conditions means you are more likely to have better outcomes. However, there may be a specific reason you should not get a certain treatment. For instance, you should not take aspirin to prevent heart attack if you are allergic to aspirin. Patients who should not get the “recommended” care for most are not counted in these measures.

One of the care quality measures for heart attack is for heart attack patients to receive aspirin upon arrival at the hospital because aspirin can help keep blood clots from forming and dissolve blood clots that can cause heart attacks.

Another national health care quality improvement initiative that St. John’s is participating in this year is the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS). HEDIS is a set of standardized performance measures designed to ensure that health plans purchasers and consumers have the information they need to reliably compare the performance of managed health care plans.

The performance measures in HEDIS are related to many significant public health issues such as cancer, heart disease, smoking, asthma and diabetes. HEDIS also includes a standardized survey of consumers' experiences that evaluates plan performance in areas such as customer service, access to care and claims possessing.

St. John’s is committed to making continual improvements to its health care delivery system.