UM Wins Quality Prize, Boosts Quality Info Online
Just how good is the care University of Michigan Health System?
Well, the university announced Tuesday that UM had been named to the 65 Top Hospitals in America by The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit that compiles data about hospital safety and quality nationwide.
UM also announced an expansion of the Web site where it posts unvarnished data about the quality of its care and the ratings that patients give them.
To perform your own search of the data, visit www.leapfroggroup.org/cp .
As for the raw quality data, few hospitals post it like UM has: on a Web site open to anyone, with dozens of charts and graphs showing actual performance and comparisons to national averages and benchmarks.
Now, UMHS has added even more data to that site, which is located at www.UofMHealth.org/quality and was launched earlier this year. The update gives patients, parents, insurers, referring physicians and others full access to a full range of unbiased and up-to-date information.
The site now covers conditions ranging from diabetes and heart attacks to children's trauma and organ transplants, and shows how well UMHS provides care in settings ranging from outpatient clinics to intensive care units.
It also shows how UMHS patients rate the care they receive, and how well UMHS is doing toward its goal of becoming the safest health system in the United States.
"We're committed to sharing this information so everyone both within and outside the health system can assess our performance and, where we are not performing as expected, see what we're doing to improve," says Darrell Campbell Jr., M.D., chief medical officer of UMHS and the Henry King Ransom Professor of Surgery. Campbell is responsible for the overall quality of care delivered at UMHS, and has a special interest in patient safety.
For instance, charts on the site now show that:
* Heart attack patients treated at UMHS got emergency angioplasty far faster than the national goal of 90 minutes, and had a better survival rate than the national average.
* Heart bypass surgery patients and patients having surgery on their aorta (the largest blood vessel in the body, leading from the heart) at UM had better survival than others nationwide.
* For patients with diabetes, UMHS care is in or near the top 10 percent nationwide on care that can prevent complications or detect them early.
* Patient ratings of UMHS inpatient, outpatient and emergency department care continue to rise. For instance, patients who had outpatient surgery at UMHS rated their care at an average of 97.5 out of 100, and 94.6 percent of patients treated at a UM outpatient location said they would recommend it to their family and friends.
* Prostate cancer patients undergoing radical prostatectomy at UMHS were more likely to avoid problems with urinary and sexual function than patients treated at other institutions
* Radiation doses to patients who get a chest or abdominal CT scan at UMHS are far lower than national averages, and medical imaging is used neither too much nor too little.
* Children receiving a kidney transplant at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital had a better success rate and 100 percent survival for all three years after their surgery
* Ninety-nine percent of all UM inpatients at high risk for developing dangerous blood clots received medications or other treatments to prevent those clots – far higher than the national average
* Premature babies treated at the UMHS neonatal intensive care unit do better than babies at 90 percent of similar units nationwide in a key measure of weight gain
* Critically ill adults treated in a UM intensive care unit are less likely to die than would be expected given the severity of their condition, and less likely than national average to develop dangerous bloodstream infections.
* For child trauma patients, the number of unplanned events (operations and ICU transfers) is virtually zero -- an indicator of overall quality of care
Also on the site are also stories of improvements that UMHS teams have made in order to achieve better performance on many measures, a list of the quality partnerships that UMHS is participating in or leading, and a link to a list of the many award and honors UMHS has received.
The team behind the site -- composed of members from UMHS Clinical Information & Decision Support Services, Public Relations & Marketing Communications, Quality Improvement and the Administrative Fellowship program -- will continue to plan to add new and updated data to the site this spring.
Meanwhile, the Leapfrog Group rating calls UMHS hospitals among the safest and most effective hospitals in the country. This is the second year in a row, and third year overall, that Leapfrog named the UM Hospitals and Health Centers a top hospital.
The announcement is being made at Leapfrog's 11th annual meeting Tuesday in Washington, D.C.
The UM Hospitals and Health Centers ranks among 65 institutions named 2011 Leapfrog Top Hospitals, based on a rating system that provides a detailed assessment of a hospital's safety and quality. The top hospitals list includes university and other teaching hospitals, children's hospitals and community hospitals in urban, suburban and rural settings. UM is one of five Michigan hospitals on the list.
And UM is one of only four hospitals in the nation ranked by both the Leapfrog Group and U.S. News & World Report, another top health care quality rating organization.
The 2011 Top Hospitals list is based on the results from nearly 1,200 hospitals that responded to the Leapfrog Group's Hospital Quality and Safety Survey. The survey focuses on four critical areas of patient safety: the use of computer physician order entry to prevent medication errors; standards for doing high-risk procedures such as heart surgery; protocols and policies to reduce medical errors and other safe practices recommended by the National Quality Forum; and adequate nurse and physician staffing.
The Leapfrog Group is a coalition of public and private purchasers of employee health coverage founded in 2000 to work for improvements in health care safety, quality and affordability. A complete list of 2011 Leapfrog Top Hospitals is available at its Web site.
Every year, UMHS has more than 44,800 admissions, 81,000 emergency services/urgent care visits and 46,000 surgical cases.
The University of Michigan Health System includes the UM Hospitals & Health Centers, which comprises: three hospitals (University Hospital, C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and Von Voigtlander Women's Hospital) and dozens of outpatient health centers and clinics; the UM Medical School with its Faculty Group Practice and extensive research and education programs; and the clinical operations of the UM School of Nursing.
UMHS has been recognized many times for excellence in patient care, including 17 years on the honor roll of "America's Best Hospitals," as compiled by U.S. News & World Report.
For information about the University of Michigan Health System, see http://www.UofMHealth.org.
