"Health care professionals desperately want to provide the highest quality, safest, most appropriate care for all of their patients," said Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Director Carolyn Clancy, M.D., May 5 at a Senate hearing examining the Obama administration's efforts around improving health care quality and patient safety. "Unfortunately with all of the complexity of health care, deficiencies of the system in which they practice, needed improvements in teamwork and communication, and impaired information flow, high quality safe health care can be perceived as a significant challenge."
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing primarily focused on the Department of Health and Human Services' National Quality Strategy and its new Partnership for Patients - a collaboration with hospitals and others to reduce hospital acquired conditions and preventable hospital readmissions. The initiative will use $1 billion in Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act funding to test models of safer care delivery, promote best practices, and help Medicare patients at high risk for readmission safely transition from the hospital to other care settings.
By 2014, participants hope to reduce HACs by 40% and preventable readmissions by 20% to save up to $35 billion across the health care system. Timothy Charles, president and CEO of Mercy Cedar Rapids (IA) Hospital, and Philip Mehler, M.D., chief medical officer for Denver Health, also shared their hospitals' ongoing efforts to improve quality and patient safety.
[ via AHA News Now ]
