Most media attention in South Carolina today is focused on the incriminating photographs of Olympic hero Michael Phelps allegedly huffing marijuana bong hits and whether the cops in Columbia will press drug possession charges against the world's greatest swimmer.
Away from the center ring of that media circus, however, there is real news breaking in the Palmetto State, and it's coming from the healthcare sector. Midday today marks the launch of the South Carolina Healthcare Quality Trust, a statewide, voluntary hospital quality collaborative to reduce hospital-acquired infections and their associated costs.
SCHQT is an awkward acronym for a promising program that creates an information-sharing portal linking the state's 65 hospitals with one another and with the major academic and research medical facilities in the state, with an emphasis on using evidence-based practices that eliminate preventable HAIs.
Rick Foster, MD, a family physician and senior vice president of quality and patient safety for the South Carolina Hospital Association, says the free information-sharing portal will be an important new tool available to every hospital in the state, no matter how small or remote. "We're making this available to small and rural and critical-access hospitals, where they may have more limited resources from an infection control standpoint or may not have direct access to infectious disease physicians," he says.
SCHQT will allow hospitals to determine what's causing the HAIs and to find and promote preventive procedures. "We are one of the states that does have required reporting for HAIs, so there is more visibility in our state as far as where we are and where we have opportunities for improvement," Foster says. "We felt like we needed to find better ways to use the data that was being reported for quality research purposes and not just for public reporting."
In addition to SCHA and its member hospitals and major health systems, the first-of-its-kind SCHQT ties in medical researchers from Clemson University, Medical University of South Carolina, and the University of South Carolina. SCHQT is coordinated through Health Sciences South Carolina, a private-public collaborative of the state's major universities and health systems, with the help of Premier Inc., the healthcare-purchasing network that has compiled a massive repository of clinical information.
According to Premier, about 1.7 million hospital patients in the United States acquired an HAI every year, costing the healthcare system more than $6.25 billion. Premier says South Carolina hospitals spent nearly $40 million last year in additional care costs because of HAIs, which increased the patient length of stay by more than eight days, or a total of 24,000 extra hospital days.
Jeanne Ward, president and CEO of Oconee Medical Center, in Seneca, SC, a 165-bed community hospital in the northwestern corner of the state, says SCHQT puts South Carolina among the vanguard in HAI control and gives rural hospitals a valuable new tool. "When you're in a smaller community, you don't have access to the epidemiologists at a larger research university or the information that some of the larger research universities have on line. It's a bit of a struggle for us," Ward says. "With this system we will be able to access all the research and best practices for preventing infections and for providing care for patients who do have an HAI, and we will be able to benchmark our performance against national and state standards."
While the focus today is on HAIs, Foster says SCHQT has the potential to provide evidence-based healthcare for other prevalent infirmities, like acute and chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart and vascular diseases. "What we'd like to have is a broad scope of resources and tools that can help on the clinical quality and safety sides," he says.
Foster and Ward are right to be excited about SCHQT. Programs that link hospitals, share resources, and pool data will play an increasingly important role in healthcare delivery in this country as our population ages and our physician base shrinks. It's not a splashy story for the top of the news hour, but we should nevertheless stay tuned for further developments.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeaders Media. He can be reached atjcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
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How do you successfully advertise critical care—a service that most patients don't think about until they need it? Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Medical Center, in Richmond, VA, recently opened its Critical Care Hospital. They also launched a campaign to raise awareness of the new services to the community.
"We know that nobody is going to say, 'Well, I think I'm going to have a critical care need; I'm going to go on down to VCU,'" says Susan Dubuque, president of VCU's agency, Neathawk Dubuque & Packett, which has offices in Richmond and Roanoke, VA.
"We really wanted to give consumers in the region a sense of comfort. That was really the key message. We didn't want to focus on the blood and guts. We wanted to focus on the fact that any day at any time in the life of any person in Virginia, a critical care need could arise. And though you're not prepared for it isn't it wonderful to know that someone is?"
The multi-integrated campaign started with an internal communications effort followed by an external campaign that focused on four critical care specialties: burn, heart, cancer, and NICU. "We really tried to highlight the service areas from a product angle," says Dubuque, "and the fact that that all of those services are right there in one place."
The strategy behind the imagery was to provide various views of the types of patients that at some point might potentially need care at the Critical Care Hospital. This can be seen in an ad for the facility's burn center, which features a firefighter, and in an ad for the facility's NICU, which features an expectant couple.
"We know that despite all our best preventative efforts there are going to be babies born prematurely," says Marcos Irigaray, vice president of strategy and marketing for VCU. "That's why we're here, for the unexpected."
Kandace McLaughlin Doyle is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. Send her Campaign Spotlight ideas at kdoyle@healthleadersmedia.com If you are a marketer submitting a campaign on behalf of your facility or client, please ensure you have permission before doing so.
The U.S. healthcare system is on life support because it costs too much and saps economic vitality, achieves far too little return on investment, and isn't distributed equitably, according to this commentary published in the New York Times. The piece calls for a new healthcare business model based on "disruptive innovation," with advances in medical technology and research paving the way for better and more effective individualized care without increased costs.
The abrupt collapse of Tom Daschle's cabinet nomination undercuts President Obama's mission to expand healthcare by depriving him of a well positioned architect for a big legislative campaign and leaving him without a backup plan. Daschle's decision to withdraw his candidacy for secretary of health and human services could slow the president's drive to reshape the nation's healthcare system as the White House searches for a replacement, analysts said. But the White House insisted that Daschle's departure would not stop the effort to cover the uninsured and rein in health costs.
The Loudoun County, VA, Board of Supervisors has voted to reject a proposal by HCA Virginia to build a hospital in Loudoun, capping more than five years of fierce debate over how best to meet the rising demand for medical care. After an intense campaign by Inova Health System to prevent a competitor from taking root in Loudoun, the board voted against the proposal to build a 164-bed acute-care facility. The decision was the latest development in a long-running battle between nonprofit Inova and the for-profit hospital network HCA.
Eighteen months after unveiling plans to build a $400 million replacement hospital in New Lenox, Silver Cross Hospital has gotten the green light to open a satellite center in nearby Frankfort, IL. The proposed urgent-care center will house an imaging facility, doctors' offices and a sleep-study center with three to six beds, officials said. The Frankfort center's approval comes several months after construction began on another Silver Cross satellite facility—a 30,000-square-foot medical professional building and health center in Homer Glen, IL.