Hospitals Care about Patient Safety

The acronym “HAC” does not sound appealing. When you learn it means Hospital-Acquired Condition, you know there is nothing appealing about it at all. If you have been a patient on the receiving end of a HAC, you can confirm it’s as unpleasant as it sounds. Many of us have read stories about patients who went to the hospital to be treated for one diagnosis and ended up with complications.

Ultimately, no one is perfect. We all have areas for improvement. Every year, we set goals to work on ways to make us better. In North Texas, we are lucky to live in an area where so many medical providers work in partnership through the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation (DFWHC Foundation) to continually improve the quality of patient care and reduce HACs. Many North Texas facilities participate in a Hospital Engagement Network (HEN). This program assists hospitals in education and implementation of best practices to ensure patients do not acquire infections during their stay.

Through our Business Intelligence Tool (BI) MyIQ Analytics, we have been able to give hospitals the ability to analyze how they are doing in patient safety compared to regional, state and national levels. This analysis can point hospitals in the right direction when setting goals.

Through our partnership and the support of the HEN, we were able to design a dashboard report that assists North Texas hospitals to access information in order to inspire meaningful change. Through our ability to obtain quality data in an efficient manner, we’ve been able to succeed in reducing HACs. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services reported only seven out of the 50 HEN’s in the U.S. have hospitals showing improvement. The DFWHC Foundation was one of the seven, with six facilities within our HEN displaying improvements in six or more HACs.

Congratulations to those hospitals! For more information, please contact Theresa Mendoza at tmendoza@dfwhcfoundation.org.