CDH Recognized for Quality Care by National Group

NORTHAMPTON — CareScience, an independent, Philadelphia-based company that provides clinical analysis of U.S. hospitals, recognized Cooley Dickinson Hospital as one of only six institutions to achieve Select National Quality Leader status — a distinction given to the top 1{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} of hospitals nationwide.

CareScience also designed CDH as a top-performing hospital in three of seven disease specific categories including heart failure, ischemic stroke, and pneumonia.
Donna Truesdell, director of quality improvement at Cooley Dickinson, said hospital staff and physicians always seek to provide the best care possible to every patient, every day. Of the distinction from CareScience, she added that “it is rewarding to see objective data that demonstrates Cooley’s progress in achieving that goal.

“Success in quality and efficiency of care are achieved by skilled medical staff working collaboratively with the hospital staff, and a mindset of constantly looking for opportunities to improve the care and services we provide,” continued Truesdell. “To get an external vote of confidence about our work in heart failure, ischemic stroke, and pneumonia points to the tremendous teamwork on behalf of our patients by CDH physicians, nurses, and other front-line staff.”

Since 2002, CDH has been working toward these standards, and since then has: hired clinical nurse specialists to serve as unit-based mentors, expert nurses, and facilitators of evidence-based best practices; become one of the first hospitals to commit to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) 100,000 Lives Campaign, a nationwide initiative implementing changes proven to improve patient care and prevent avoidable deaths; joined the Mass. Hospital Association and the Mass. Organization of Nurse Executives quality and safety initiative “Patients First: Continuing the Commitment to Safe Care”; become a Mass. Department of Public Health-approved Primary Stroke Service facility; and been named an IHI Mentor Hospital in the categories of preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia, preventing central line infections, and preventing adverse drug events by reconciling medications.

According to IHI, mentor hospitals —there are approximately 100 nationwide —are available to offer best-practices advice to other hospitals.

“Your facility demonstrated a combination of superior clinical outcomes and exceptional efficiency in patient care,” wrote Dr. Richard Bankowitz, vice president and medical director at CareScience, in a letter to CDH president and CEO Craig Melin.

Cooley Dickinson’s rank was determined by the CareScience Select Practice methodology that utilizes both quality and efficiency indices to track the hospital’s performance. The quality index is calculated by combining the outcome deviations for mortality, morbidity, and complications into a single quality measure for each facility.

CareScience calculates its efficiency index by using length of stay as a proxy for resource usage, which reflects how efficiently hospitals allocate resources among patients. The combined quality and efficiency rating determines the CareScience annual Select Practice Leader award recipients. All acute care inpatient facilities in the United States with at least 50 cases of a given disease were eligible to receive a CareScience Select Practice Leader designation given to the top 4{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} in that disease area.

“Cooley Dickinson Hospital’s inclusion in the CareScience 2006 Select Practice Leader Report confirms the organization’s dedication and success in implementing high-quality patient care,” added Bankowitz.