EMPATH Client Wins Top CMS Award

"There is definitely a connection between quality and operations performance. Better patient care operations means patients are seen faster and more effectively. They are also sent home sooner and statistics show that those patients who spend less time in the hospital have better outcomes. Operationally, it used to be that a busy day in our ED was 130 patients; now it's 230. House-wide, we used to be literally packed with 380 inpatients, and now we are routinely handling over 500. There has been a significant difference in our ability to provide quality and to manage operations with EMPATH's work hospital-wide," explains Elaine Couture, COO of Sacred Heart.


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	EMPATH Client Wins Top CMS Award During the first three years of this CMS pay-for-performance project, participating hospitals have raised quality of care in five clinical areas by an average of nearly 16%. This year, Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Washington has been named the top performer. Out of 112 top performing hospitals, Sacred Heart was awarded the highest quality incentive payment in the amount of $385,342 for their top marks in four out of the five targeted areas. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), in alliance with Premier, manage Premier healthcare alliance Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), a project designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of patient care. At CMS/HQID hospitals, quality data is collected on heart attacks and heart failure, coronary artery bypass graphs, pneumonia and hip and knee replacements on a voluntary basis. Measurement is made through 30 evidence-based clinical quality indicators that were developed by government and private organizations. Sacred Heart ranked in the top 10 percent in the country for overall quality in the clinical areas of heart attack, congestive heart failure and total joint replacement, and in the top 20 percent for coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. "There is definitely a connection between quality and operations performance. Better patient care operations means patients are seen faster and more effectively. They are also sent home sooner and statistics show that those patients who spend less time in the hospital have better outcomes. Operationally, it used to be that a busy day in our ED was 130 patients; now it's 230. House-wide, we used to be literally packed with 380 inpatients, and now we are routinely handling over 500. There has been a significant difference in our ability to provide quality and to manage operations with EMPATH's work hospital-wide," explains Elaine Couture, COO of Sacred Heart. Congratulations to our client — a top-performing hospital — as they continue to set the bar for highest quality patient care nationwide.	"Achieving Process Innovation." Healthcare Executive, MAR/APR 2009 (PDF) SHMC Press Release (PDF) Modern Healthcare Press Release (PDF)