Quality

• Awards and Recognition
  • 2009 CareChex Award
  • 2009 Quest
  • 2009/2010 Consumer Choice Award
  • 2009 Healthgrades
  • 2007 America’s 50 Best Hospitals
  • 2007 Healthgrades
  • 2006 Healthgrades – Women’s Services
  • 2006 HealthGrades
  • 2005 Texas Health Care Quality Improvement Award
  • 2005 VHA Leadership Award
  • 2005 HealthGrades
  • 2004 Solucient Top 100
• Patient Safety
• Accreditations and Licensure

Quality

Outcomes

Good Shepherd Medical Center is a recognized and award winning healthcare provider. We engage in cutting edge performance measurement and have established successful, ongoing, collaborative relationships with key performance measurement entities.

Outcome measurement is one way to tell whether a hospital is going a good job and can be used to find out whether patients admitted to the hospital have successful outcomes. These measures of care are key in showing how often hospitals give recommended treatments known to get the best outcomes for patients. Outcome measures provide meaningful, relevant and easily understood information about hospital performance to our patients and community.

The measures are based on scientific evidence about treatments that are known to get the best results. Health care experts and researchers are constantly evaluating the evidence to make sure that guidelines and measures are kept up-to-date. Good Shepherd uses the process of care measures to provide heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical care to evaluate our the care provided and maintain quality outcomes over time.

The key outcome measure of mortality is used to determine whether patients admitted to the hospital have risk-adjusted death (mortality) rates that are lower (better) than the U.S. National rate, about the same as the U.S. National rate, or higher (worse) than the U.S. National rate, given how sick they were when they were admitted to the hospital. In a collaborative effort, all department/services and disciplines of our facility continually work toward achieving the highest possible outcomes.

Core Measures

What are Core Measures:

Core Measures track a variety of evidence-based, scientifically-researched standards of care which have been shown to result in improved clinical outcomes for patients. CMS (the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services) established the Core Measures in 2000 and began publicly reporting data relating to the Core Measures in 2003. Currently, there are Core Measures that spread over four areas.

• Heart Failure- Heart failure accounts for more than 700,000 hospitalizations every year with high rates of readmissions, mortality, and morbidity. Heart failure is rising with the aging public.

• AMI-1.1 million people have heart attacks each year. Almost 2/3 of those patients do not have a full recovery.

• Pneumonia- Pneumonia accounts for nearly 600,000 Medicare hospitalizations every year. Pneumonia is the 5th leading cause of death in patients aged 65 and older.

• SCIP-22% of preventable deaths are attributed to postoperative complications. There are approximately 500,000 surgical site infections a year. Surgical patients are also 20 times more likely to have a VTE/PE. PE causes 300,000 deaths per year.