Massachusetts Hospital Measures
Frequency: Periodically
Measure Type: Process
To evaluate safety and quality of care in hospitals, Massachusetts has introduced the Patients First program. Nursing leaders along with hospitals developed the Patients First System to offer health care choices to the public. Participants represented are from the Massachusetts Hospital Association (MHA) and the Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Executives (MONE).
This website consists of 26 different measures relating to: falls, falls with injury, heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical infection. Patients can view a specific hospital and observe the hospitals attempt to meet the states standard. They can also compare the hospital they have chosen to “peer” hospitals of the same size. Information from participating hospitals present the staffing plans along with the hospital size (i.e. amount of hospital beds).
The National Quality Forum (NQF) is a non-for-profit organization that has created a national strategy for health care quality reporting. The data is collected from a hospital’s own staff. Majority of the time this is being conducted by nurses or experts in quality improvement. Data presented on this website is not funding by an audit staff. Each hospital signs a form stating they provided accurate data. Information is updated periodically. Each hospital has several resources they use to update their data. For example, the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, reported ‘patients falls with injury per 1,000 patient days’, deriving their data from the MHA’s Patients First project. Their report on ‘heart failure care’ came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.