U.S. hospitals have significantly improved quality of care provided for heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia over the past four years, according to a new report from The Joint Commission, but room for improvement exists for most of the quality measures. The report details the performance of accredited hospitals against standardized national performance measures and the Joint Commission’s national patient safety goals and finds that hospitals are currently achieving 90% performance or higher for about half of the measures tracked since 2002. Hospitals are performing at less than 65% for two of these measures--providing pneumococcal screening and vaccination to patients admitted with pneumonia and providing discharge instructions to patients admitted with heart failure. The magnitude of improvement in the safety and quality of care provided ranged from 1.1% to 42.8% between 2002 and 2005, with performance improving the fastest on measures where the initial performance level was lowest.
Hospital performance also varied widely by state. For example, the statewide averages for providing discharge instructions to patients admitted with heart failure range from 33.5% to 89%. Read the report.
