Hospital Patient Safety and Quality Monitoring: A Resource for Governing Boards and Trustees

About the Authors:
Sanjaya Kumar, MD, M.Sc., MPH is President & CMO and Chairman of the Board and Catherine Carson-Martin, RN, BSN, MPA is Director, Programs Management, at Quantros, Inc., a Miloitas, CA-based company that provides real-time knowledge solutions for benchmarking, patient safety, accreditation and compliance, and outcomes monitoring for health care providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies

Preface:
Modern day American hospitals are far more complex entities than the charitable health care institutions of the past – providing services to a diverse group of patients in communities they serve, participating in actively building community awareness for better health, providing for economic growth, and meeting increasing demands from regulatory agencies and payers to demonstrate performance improvement. In addition, hospitals are now being required to demonstrate compliance with recognized standards of care and practices from different regulatory agencies and payers.

Even though today’s hospital governing boards have responsibility for the quality of care provided in the institutions they govern, there is less agreement concerning their specific roles and responsibilities for this function. Recent legislation (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) provides actionable guidance for boards in overseeing the quality or safety of care their hospitals provide. Furthermore, due to the diverse performance domain requirements of health care institutions and the current environment of increased accountability for governing boards, board members (trustees) need to be more vigilant than ever before in overseeing all of the activities of the hospital, including monitoring the quality and safety of care.

While hospital board members do not direct daily operations or indicate to physicians and other health care providers how to treat their patients, they do need to monitor the quality and safety outcomes of care based on key indicators and metrics of performance. Unlike the past, today there is a wealth of quality and safety data; the challenge is in synthesizing and making available in formats that support review of progress toward meeting quality and safety improvement goals by the governing boards of hospitals.

This publication is intended to provide board members with a comprehensive overview of the quality and patient safety journey in health care and to discuss examples of quality and safety indicators and performance measures that can be made available at the governing board level to drive effective oversight.

For more information or to order, contact the Center at 888-540-6111 or email at info@americangovernance.com