Four Ways 100 Top Hospitals® Program Data and Designations Can Be Leveraged for Improved Performance

Premier’s PINC AI™ 100 Top Hospitals® program aligns its efforts around improving the health of communities by integrating data and analytics and utilizing tech-enabled solutions to enhance quality and patient safety.

The program aims to inspire leaders to strive for higher performance and provide added value to their communities by using objective, reliable and significant indicators of clinical, financial and operational excellence.

Here are four ways that hospitals are leveraging the objective, publicly available program data to set goals, develop strategies and identify areas of improvement.

1. Improving Recruitment, Retention and Health System Growth
   
   In today’s healthcare environment, many hospitals and health systems are facing workforce management challenges including a shortage of healthcare workers. To tackle these challenges, some hospitals and health systems are leveraging their “100 Top Hospitals” designation to improve their recruitment and retention of top clinical staff.
   
   St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) has a recruitment tagline, “Where You Train Matters,” denoting the importance of training at a top-quality designated organization to clinical staff.
   
   “Clinicians want to work in a top-designated organization and one that is focused on providing high-quality patient-centered care,” said Donna Sabol, RN, MSN, CPHQ Senior Vice President, Chief Quality Officer, SLUHN.
   
   Another health system, Cone Health, leverages program data to support health system and clinical service line growth and support improvements in patient safety, quality and outcomes. Recently, they embarked on a $200 million expansion and investment project in their cardiovascular services. Initially, leadership questioned if they should continue the expansion based on cost, but the team utilized their 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals™ designation and overall program data to reaffirm the need for continual investment.
   
   
2. Motivating Staff
   
   One study found that staff engagement improves outcomes for an organization. In this ever-changing world of healthcare, it can be challenging for leaders to motivate staff and keep them looped into organizational initiatives.
   
   SLUHN works to celebrate designations to highlight their teams’ accomplishments. For their 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals™ designation, they felt it was important to recognize the cardiologists and all supporting staff since everyone played an active role in achieving the designation.
   
   Cone Health begins every meeting with celebrations and the 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals™ designation is mentioned often to serve as a reminder of how much they have accomplished.
   
   
3. Identifying Quality Areas for Improvement
   
   Hospitals and health systems put a lot of time into identifying opportunities for improvement, including reducing length of stay, reducing readmissions and improving patient care and outcomes.
   
   Kettering Health looks for ways to compare their performance with peers utilizing the 100 Top Hospitals designations and data in their goal setting and strategy development sessions.
   
   “We pay a lot of attention to the 100 Top [Hospitals] program data. It is our number one benchmarking tool and outside review for comparison,” said Marcy Vixie, System Executive Director of Patient and Quality Safety, Kettering Health. “Being a 100 Top Hospital is a goal for each one of our hospitals at Kettering Health. The designation is viewed as a reflection of the top-quality care provided and is considered a win every single time.”
   
   
4. Responding to Quality Dips, Dashboards and Peer-to-Peer Benchmarking
   
   Clinical teams know they cannot be winners all the time, but they always strive for the most optimal patient care and outcomes. SLUHN reviews quality data regularly to figure out the reason for the dips, how to correct course, maintain high performance and provide optimal patient care.
   
   Cone Health routinely measures quality performance and indicators that can impact care, overall achievements and quality designations.
   
   “It’s great to be a part of a winning team and have outside accolades proving you’re a winning team,” said Ruth Fisher, MBA, Vice President, Heart and Vascular Service Line, Cone Health. “When you’re not a winning team, it just gives you more incentive to get back on top. Folks want to be the best and they strive for the best.”
   
   Kettering Health responds to a dip in quality standards by creating a task force to review coding, documentation and clinical care to identify areas for improvement. In addition, they created their own dashboards to review trends in outcomes and review monthly data in improvements.
   
   Marcy said: “These dashboards keep the teams motivated to provide great care, every day to every patient.”
   
   In addition to being able to spot quality concerns, peer-to-peer benchmarking is also important to hospitals and health systems as they strive to understand their own performance, identify gaps and improvement opportunities, as well as highlight peer performance they could emulate.
   
   SLUHN places great importance on their efforts to continually submit data to Premier’s PINC AI™ QualityAdvisor™, a clinical benchmarking solution, to produce their system scorecards and align these efforts with their top decile achievement goals.
   
   Kettering Health’s entire cardiology team banded together to set their five-year goals and the team agreed the 50 Top Cardiovascular designation gave an objective and balanced scorecard to inform their overall goals and strategy.
   
   The team accepted the 50 Top Cardiovascular designation as their true North Star, as they believe the data from the program is the most recent data reflective of their work, quality improvements, and overall patient safety and outcomes.
   
   “Our whole cardiac team got together, all the surgeons and the cardiologists, and I asked them where they wanted to be in five years?” said Marcy Vixie, System Executive Director of Patient and Quality Safety, Kettering Health. “They replied with ‘at the top’ and so we made the 50 Top Cardiovascular designation our North Star, worked to achieve the designation - and six years later we’re still maintaining that designation."

The Future is Honest and Objective Data

Objective and honest data helps hospitals and health systems benchmark against peers, identify areas for quality improvement and enhance recruitment and retention strategies.

The 100 Top Hospitals™ program is accessible to everyone and utilizes non-biased, publicly available data to compile hospital and health system reports in one-year and five-year comparisons. These reports consist of risk, wage and severity adjusted data, and puts hospitals in cohorts for nationwide comparison to select those worthy of the designation as a 15 Top Health System,100 Top Hospital or a 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospital.

Watch this recent panel discussion from the Premier Breakthroughs conference where top hospitals shared their top secrets. Learn more about how the PINC AI™ 100 Top Hospitals program can assist in your benchmarking, goal setting, strategy development, and recruitment and retention efforts.