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Community Focus

Delta Regional Medical Center Team Members Attend

Mississippi hospital is one of ten “Expecting Success” hospitals nationwide

 

GREENVILLE, Ms. – In an effort to develop solutions to the well-documented problems of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, Delta Regional Medical Center (DRMC) team members participated in a 29-month long study, Expecting Success: Excellence in Cardiac Care. A team of DRMC executives and administrators attended a final meeting with the Expecting Success Team in Washington, DC, May 8-9, 2008 to participate in the announcement of the major findings of the study.

 

Expecting Success is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at George Washington University which is intended to improve the quality of healthcare provided to minority populations in the United States. The Expecting Success program consisted of ten select hospitals nationwide who received a grant and ongoing assistance, as part of their participation in the Learning Network, to reduce healthcare disparities.

 

DRMC team members who attended the meeting included: L. Ray Humphreys, CEO; Florence Jones, Chief Administrative Office West Campus; Marge Clifford, Director of Cardiology; Diana Goodell, Director of Telemetry; Billy Schultz, Board of Trustees Chairman; Dr. Michael Mansour, Cardiologist; Mildred Crockett, Board of Trustees; and Michelle Britton, Administrator, Heart & Vascular Center.

 

According to Ray Humphreys, DRMC CEO, “As our country faces the rising cost of healthcare, it is more important than ever that we help to eliminate healthcare disparities in the Delta. The findings will allow us to serve as a leader in our community, sharing the initiatives we have developed and implemented here at DRMC with our state’s other hospitals to work toward resolving healthcare disparities among minority

populations.

 

The hospitals and their community care partners participated in a 29-month long collaborative study to improve the quality of care for African Americans and Latinos with cardiovascular disease. The program, which began in September 2005, came to a close at the final meeting May 8-9. Representatives from the hospitals met to share the results of their individual improvements and initiatives with inpatient and community care.

 

Expecting Success worked closely with teams from each grantee hospital and assessed each site in terms of its readiness for change and in creating an Improvement Plan to guide its activities in improving cardiac care. Sites also received training in creating and using uniform methods to collect and submit standardized race and ethnicity specific data including the metrics used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Quality Alliance. Through Expecting Success, surveys of patient experiences were also collected and analyzed for the sites’ evaluation purposes.

 

This multi-year quality improvement initiative, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has significantly helped hospitals identify and reduce racial and ethnic disparities in their cardiac programs while simultaneously improving the quality of care for all patients.

DRMC’s Expecting Success team included nursing managers, bedside nurses, representatives from the Quality Department, Admissions, Medical Records, Case Management (CM) and Planning and Development.

 

Each month, the DRMC team collected the required performance measures and reported results to the National Program Office. They then analyzed and reviewed the findings each week, implementing strategies to improve compliance with the CMS quality indicators and reduce disparities. A majority of the measures indicated improvements in the scores for African American patients, with disparity gaps being eliminated in a number of cases. The key to making the improvements was educating physicians and nurses about the core measures, providing feedback and eliminating barriers to providing quality care.

 

Nursing Staff were provided weekly in-service classes, and the Case Management (CM) team developed monthly core measure tip sheets for posting on nursing units, placed articles in the hospital’s publication, nursing newsletter and posted information on the hospital Web site to increase compliance with core measure initiatives. Staff members were recognized for their efforts and white boards were placed in each nursing unit to identify CM patients and improve communication. Physicians were also provided quarterly individual core measure compliance reports, and flyers were posted in physician lounges and mailboxes to increase adherence to CM initiatives.

 

DRMC gathered clinical data on the Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) and Heart Failure (HF) on a monthly basis and tracked 11 specific AMI and seven HF measures/indicators for which indicators were provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under its Hospital Quality Initiative.

 

The other nine hospitals included in the Expecting Success study included: Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas; Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina; Memorial Healthcare System in South Broward County, Florida; Montefiore Medical Center in New York City; Mount Sinai Hospital Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois; Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit, Michigan; University Health System in San Antonio, Texas; University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and Washington Hospital Center in DC.

 

For more information about Expecting Success, please visit: www.expectingsuccess.org.

 

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