Year-End Hospital Compare Reports: Improved Patient Satisfaction Means Improved Ratings
Hospital leadership teams may be re-evaluating priorities after receiving the 2016 Hospital Compare ratings released by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Whether that was good news or a needs-improvement assessment hinged in large part on the steps the hospital has been taking to improve it patients’ satisfaction and clinical performance.
How hospitals rank in the new publicly reported data can have an impact on public perception, and on payments from CMS. The Hospital Compare five-star rating system shows how a hospital is performing on average compared to others. The rating summarizes up to 64 quality measures across seven areas into a single overall star rating for a hospital. The more stars, the better a hospital is performing on these measures. While the goal is five stars, most hospitals in the U.S. fall in the three-star category.
Since the ratings impact Medicare and Medicaid hospital payments – which for many hospitals can comprise a significant slice of the revenue pie - getting to five-star status is top of mind in hospital leadership circles. Hospitals are taking innovative steps to improve their performance, and the patient experience – and TRL’s technology solutions are helping them change the game. In virtually all of the key areas that CMS evaluates -- including patient safety, readmissions, patient experience, and effectiveness and timeliness of care –TRL’s solutions are helping California hospitals achieve improvements.
“Making the hospital a safer and more comfortable environment for patients, and getting patients well and home faster, are among the challenges that keep hospital leadership teams up at night,” says Sy Granillo, lead account executive in TRL’s Healthcare Division. “And as it is with most areas of our lives and work today, technological innovations are proving their value in contributing to those key performance metrics.”
Nurse call systems, for example, no longer are simply a buzzer to the nurses’ station. Rather they encompass sophisticated integrated workflows that improve caregiver productivity with solutions like smart alert-management and communications capabilities. In addition, TRL’s nurse call solutions help hospital teams work more efficiently through intelligent data collection and analysis. “Now, frontline clinicians can anticipate patient events – not merely react to them, and hospital C-suites can use the data for predictive analytics,” he says.
In addition, interactive patient engagement solutions are taking traditional in-room hardware like the patient room television, and turning it into a platform for educating patients. “From their hospital bed, the patient can access their medication information, watch videos about their specific health diagnosis, and get educated on their care protocol before they are discharged, thereby reducing the likelihood for readmission,” says Granillo. In addition, he notes, Southern California hospitals are taking this technology to another level with concierge-type features like ordering meal s and housekeeping directly through the television. “By giving patients control of room comfort settings, such as changing their room temperature or lowering the window blinds, patients are more satisfied in their stay and it is being reflected in their patient satisfaction survey ratings,” he says.
Technologies that reduce hospital noise, helping patients rest and recover faster, also are gaining in popularity. Originally driven by the need to meet HIPAA requirements, sound masking was viewed as a cost-effective way to provide reasonable safeguards for protecting personal health information from being inadvertently disclosed. But hospitals also are working with TRL to apply sound masking technology to create better environments in which patients can heal and their caregivers can work.
Moving to five-star status takes a multi-pronged approach, a cultural commitment and a willingness to apply leading-edge innovations and best practices. As TRL Systems’ hospital clients are discovering, technology can play a key role in that journey but knowing which solutions are the best fit and how to integrate them into the hospital setting can be a daunting undertaking. “Our expert healthcare team is well-versed in the complex use case applications of the full scope of healthcare technologies,” says Granillo. “Our value is in taking that broad perspective and applying it to each client’s unique situation, to ensure the hospital is making the most of its technology dollars.”