Quality Efforts Similar Around the World

DALLAS – Health care quality is now a global phenomenon, and the issues are remarkably similar no matter where medicine is practiced. That is a finding emerging an international track ongoing at Press Ganey's National Client Conference here.

This afternoon, presenters from two hospitals in Columbia described their use of Press Ganey's International Quality Indicator Project (IQIP) measurement, benchmarking and improvement tools. IQIP serves 130 hospitals in 17 countries.

Ana Lucia Correa Angel, MD, medical director of infection prevention at Hospital Pablo Tobón Uribe, in Medellin, Colombia, described how her hospital created a multidisciplinary group to improve quality of information and instituted clinical information improvement efforts such as a surgical site infection project.

Iván Solarte Rodríguez, MD, assistant director of Hospital Universitario San Ignacio in Bogata, Columbia, and a professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, discussed creating a culture of measurement, essentially from scratch. He presents clinical indicator data to his hospital board and to hospital employees monthly, and both act as "auditors of hospital clinical performance," he said.

Using benchmarked data, Hospital Universitario San Ignacio has been able to push an improvement effort that has reduced ventilator-assisted pneumonia by 7.2% in just one year.

Both presenters said they had to overcome significant institutional barriers to achieving quality improvement. That included getting physicians to buy into change. Correa said that having physician-level data was key, as long as doctors could see the methodology as correct.

Both hospitals' projects were part of an initiative in South America sponsored by Johnson & Johnson to bring the International Quality Indicator Project methodology to the region.

German Diaz, MD, MPH, strategic marketing manager for Johnson & Johnson, said that one of the factors driving quality measurement success in the region was increasing understanding by the C-suite of the relationship of clinical quality to financial success.

In later sessions at the conference, attendees will hear from representatives of hospitals in Malaysia, Singapore and Germany.