Three Johns Hopkins hospitals recognized as Top Performer on Key Quality Measures

Three Johns Hopkins Medicine hospitals are recipients of The Joint Commission’s 2013 Top Performer on Key Quality Measures award. The Top Performer program recognizes hospitals for improving performance on evidence-based interventions that increase the chances of healthy outcomes for patients with certain conditions, including heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care, children’s asthma, stroke, venous thromboembolism (VTE) and perinatal care, as well as for inpatient psychiatric services and immunizations.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland; Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland; and Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., each earned the distinction. This is the second year that The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Sibley Memorial Hospital have been recognized as a Top Performer, a distinction only achieved by 712 hospitals across the nation. The 2013 Top Performer award is the first for Suburban Hospital. A total of 1,224 hospitals, representing 36.9 percent of all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals, achieved the 2013 honor.

“At Johns Hopkins Medicine, we are dedicated to improving patient care and advancing the science of improvement,” says Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. “Our hospitals develop and implement interventions and accountability plans that allow us to improve the quality of the care that we provide to each and every patient. The Top Performer award is further proof of our continued commitment to provide the safest care and the best chance of recovery to all patients who walk through our doors.”

To be a 2013 Top Performer, hospitals had to meet three performance criteria based on 2013 accountability measure data, including:

• Achieving cumulative performance of 95 percent or above across all reported accountability measures
• Achieving performance of 95 percent or above on each and every reported accountability measure where there were at least 30 denominator cases
• And having at least one core measure set that had a composite rate of 95 percent or above, and (within that measure set) all applicable individual accountability measures had a performance rate of 95 percent or above.

“What matters most to patients at Sibley Memorial Hospital is the quality and safety of the care they receive,” says Richard “Chip” Davis, president of Sibley Memorial Hospital. “Our patients deserve nothing less than high-quality health care that is appropriate, safe and effective. That is why we are committed to developing and using innovative and evidence-based care processes to improve positive patient outcomes. We are proud to be named a Top Performer as it recognizes the commitment of our entire hospital staff to obtaining these goals.”

“Our community rightfully expects they will receive health care that is of the highest quality and safety at their hospital,” says Gene E. Green, president of Suburban Hospital. “I am immensely gratified that this recognition by The Joint Commission confirms we are doing exactly that.”

Sibley Memorial Hospital was recognized for its achievements in pneumonia and surgical care. The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Suburban Hospital each received the Top Performer recognition in four areas: heart attack, heart failure, surgical care and pneumonia.

“The Joint Commission’s Top Performer award is much appreciated, and is a reflection of our hard work in improving performance on core measures, says Katie Servis, director of quality improvement at Suburban Hospital. “We are committed to excellent patient care, and have taken a team approach to performance improvement in the areas of heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care, among others. Suburban Hospital is proud of the care provided to our patients, and we are pleased to be recognized in this way.”

The Top Performer is one of several patient safety and quality improvement awards bestowed to hospitals under the Johns Hopkins Health System this year. The Delmarva Foundation announced this summer that The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sibley Memorial Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center each received the 2014 Excellence Award for Quality Improvement in Hospitals. Earlier this month, Johns Hopkins Home Care Group was named a top agency of the 2014 HomeCare Elite, a recognition of the top-performing home health agencies in the United States.

“The receipt of the Joint Commission and Delmarva quality awards confirms the Sibley clinical community commitment to improving health care quality and patient outcomes,” says Deborah McDonough, director of patient safety and quality improvement at Sibley Memorial Hospital.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital also received a 2014 Press Ganey Success Story Award for the quality improvement department’s VTE prevention initiatives. Also known as blood clots, VTEs are a common cause of hospital-related death, claiming an estimated 300,000 lives per year. These clots are completely preventable with the use of rigorous, scientifically based prophylaxis and intervention strategies. The team was recognized for their improvement efforts surrounding three of the six evidence-based VTE core measures required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: VTE prophylaxis, overlap therapy and Warfarin discharge instructions.

“Recognition by The Joint Commission, the Delmarva Foundation and Press Ganey highlights our continued commitment to measuring, understanding and improving patient outcomes,” says Richard Day, director of quality improvement for The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “We are honored to be recognized by these three industry leaders for our quality improvement efforts and will continue to evaluate and refine our practices to ensure that our patients receive the best and safest clinical care possible.”