Report shows little improvement in hospitals meeting safety standards
In a recent report published in Health Affairs, researchers found that there hasn’t been a lot of progress over the years when it comes to hospitals meeting certain safety standards.
According to John Moran, lead author of the report and an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at Penn State University, the Leapfrog Group, an organization that promotes hospital safety and quality, established a voluntary hospital survey that assessed compliance with several safety standards, including public reporting and adoption of using computerized drug order entry and hospital intensivists.
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Moran used the survey data collected from between 2002 and 2007 to conduct a longitudinal assessment of how hospitals in specific states and cities progressed on using some of these required standards and found that there had not been significant progress overall.
Specifically, he found that reporting rates were unchanged throughout the study period. Adoption of computerized drug order entry increased from 2.94 percent to 8.13 percent and intensivist staffing increased from 14.74 percent to 21.4 percent.
He noted that while the data is slightly older and focused on only two areas of hospital standards, the study may “paint a broader picture and shed some light on what kind of information is received from hospitals when they are asked to voluntarily report in areas of patient safety.”
“One of the big picture things that this report raises is how willing hospitals are to report this data,” said Moran. “Our data suggests that 60 percent of hospitals reported on where they stood on these measures – not 100 percent. When you allow reporting to be voluntary not everyone reports, and if they don’t report, what do you make of the data? What drives the decision to report this information?”
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Moran added that because reporting on these safety standards is not mandatory, policy makers may want to consider if this information is important enough to require reporting in order to ensure improvements in quality among hospitals.
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