Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, outlined how Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore sustained its success with The Joint Commission's Top Performer on Key Quality Measures program in an article published in the February 2016 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
Dr. Pronovost is senior vice president for patient safety and quality for Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. According to Dr. Pronovost and his co-authors, few studies have addressed how to sustain quality improvement efforts, until now.
To sustain efforts to deliver best practice care, leaders of Johns Hopkins Hospital implemented an initiative to guarantee that 96 percent or more of patients received care linked to Top Performer measures. The hospital targeted nine low-performing process measures improvement, including eight Joint Commission accountability measures and one Delmarva Foundation core measure.
The framework used to sustain the improvements required the hospital to do the following five things.
1. Declare and communicate goals
2. Create an enabling infrastructure
3. Engage clinicians and connect them in peer learning communities
4. Report transparently
5. Design accountability systems
Since implementing the improvement initiative, Johns Hopkins Hospital has sustained performance on all accountability measures.
"The initiative methods enabled the transition of quality improvement from an isolated project to a way of leading an organization," concluded the study authors.