Western Baptist named among the best in pneumonia care

Western Baptist Hospital is featured on a national healthcare quality Web site as one of the top-performing hospitals in the country in pneumonia care.

It was chosen because it is among the top 3 percent in pneumonia care among 2,800 hospitals with 50 or more beds.

A 12-page case study at WhyNotTheBest.org features publicly available data, as well as interviews with hospital staff, including Meri Curtis, director of quality resources, and Kim Wrye, outcomes manager/pneumonia team facilitator. It describes the strategies and factors that contributed to the hospital’s high performance.

Western Baptist utilizes multidisciplinary teams which focus on quality improvement by monitoring core measure performance data and identifying areas for improvement.

“The teams are very persistent,” Wrye said. “As soon as they hit a wall, they start looking at other avenues to achieve their goal of making positive changes in care processes.  In other words, they never give up on doing what is right for the patient.”

The persistence has led to improved care. Pneumonia patients consistently receive preventative care, such as pneumonia and flu vaccines, and treatment, including timely administration of appropriate antibiotics. Both lead to better patient outcomes.

“This is the culmination of hard work by our staff to assure patient care is appropriate and timely,” Curtis said.

The full report is available at WhyNotTheBest.org, a Web site maintained by The Commonwealth Fund as a free resource for healthcare professionals interested in tracking performance on various measures of healthcare quality. The site includes measures of hospital quality publicly reported on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Web site, Hospital Compare.

The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation working toward a high performance health system that achieves better access, improved quality and greater efficiency. The Fund supports independent research on healthcare issues and makes grants to improve healthcare practice and policy.