Plenty of hospitals and medical providers claim they do a great job at caring for patients and protecting their safety during care. But very few actually publish the cold, hard numbers that could prove those claims.
And even fewer do it like the University of Michigan Health System has: on a website open to anyone, with dozens of charts and graphs showing actual performance and comparisons to national averages and benchmarks.
Now, UMHS has added even more data to that site, which is located at www.UofMHealth.org/quality and was launched earlier this year. The update gives patients, parents, insurers, referring physicians and others full access to a full range of unbiased and up-to-date information.
The site now covers conditions ranging from diabetes and heart attacks to children's trauma and organ transplants, and shows how well UMHS provides care in settings ranging from outpatient clinics to intensive care units.
It also shows how UMHS patients rate the care they receive, and how well UMHS is doing toward its goal of becoming the safest health system in the United States.
"We're committed to sharing this information so everyone both within and outside the health system can assess our performance and, where we are not performing as expected, see what we're doing to improve," says Darrell Campbell, Jr., M.D., chief medical officer of UMHS and the Henry King Ransom Professor of Surgery. Campbell is responsible for the overall quality of care delivered at UMHS, and has a special interest in patient safety.
For instance, charts on the site now show that:
•Heart attack patients treated at UMHS got emergency angioplasty far faster than the national goal of 90 minutes, and had a better survival rate than the national average.
•Heart bypass surgery patients and patients having surgery on their aorta (the largest blood vessel in the body, leading from the heart) at U-M had better survival than others nationwide.
•For patients with diabetes, UMHS care is in or near the top 10 percent nationwide on care that can prevent complications or detect them early.
•Patient ratings of UMHS inpatient, outpatient and emergency department care continue to rise. For instance, patients who had outpatient surgery at UMHS rated their care at an average of 97.5 out of 100, and 94.6 percent of patients treated at a U-M outpatient location said they would recommend it to their family and friends.
•Prostate cancer patients undergoing radical prostatectomy at UMHS were more likely to avoid problems with urinary and sexual function than patients treated at other institutions
•Radiation doses to patients who get a chest or abdominal CT scan at UMHS are far lower than national averages, and medical imaging is used neither too much nor too little.
•Children receiving a kidney transplant at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital had a better success rate and 100 percent survival for all three years after their surgery
•99 percent of all U-M inpatients at high risk for developing dangerous blood clots received medications or other treatments to prevent those clots - far higher than the national average
•Premature babies treated at the UMHS neonatal intensive care unit do better than babies at 90 percent of similar units nationwide in a key measure of weight gain
•Critically ill adults treated in a U-M intensive care unit are less likely to die than would be expected given the severity of their condition, and less likely than national average to develop dangerous bloodstream infections.
•For child trauma patients, the number of unplanned events (operations and ICU transfers) is virtually zero - an indicator of overall quality of care
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