Quality Award
Primaris Quality Awards
The Primaris Quality Awards honor Missouri professionals who demonstrate high performance and a strong commitment to improving health care. Originally established as a means to recognize hospital accomplishments, the award has grown to salute outstanding healthcare in four provider groups: hospitals, physician offices, nursing homes and home health agencies.
Applications are in. Check back later for award announcements!
See below for last year's winners!
Read about this year's Quality Award Winners!
Home Health | Hospital | Nursing Home | Physician Office
Home Health:
Wright Memorial Hospital Home Health & Hospice, Trenton
Teamwork, open communications, constant awareness and always finishing step one before moving to step two – these are a few ways Jacquelyn Walker’s team keeps home health care in Trenton some of the best in the nation, all with fewer than ten staff members on the average day.
“Communication is number one,” said Walker, the director of Wright Memorial Hospital Home Health and Hospice. “You have to follow through to make sure the patients’ needs don’t get lost.”
And it is paying off. According to data collected by Medicare, this small home health agency in Trenton, Mo. delivers some of the best care in the nation. To honor their commitment to constant improvement and proven results, Wright Memorial Hospital Home Health and Hospice was named as the winner of the 2006 Primaris Home Health Quality Award.
“Home health agencies from across the entire state were considered for this award. While there are many excellent examples of quality improvement in home health, Wright Memorial led the pack,” said Richard A. Royer, CEO of Primaris, the nonprofit health care firm which gives the annual award.
The annual award is given each year to a single agency for outstanding efforts to improve patient care and is based on measured improvements results such as helping patients take their medications correctly, ensuring they are able to perform everyday functions, or helping manage pain.
“Wright Memorial is not just leading the state. They perform in the top 20 percent in the entire nation on five of the ten measures we record. That’s helping people bathe themselves. It’s helping them move around their homes without assistance. It’s staying out of the hospital, breathing easily and, ultimately, getting to a point where they don’t need home care,” Royer said. “Their accomplishments are impressive to say the least.”
Medicare data shows that Wright Memorial breaks both national and state averages in nearly all quality improvement measurements reported to the federal agency, in many cases setting some of the best marks in the entire industry.
For instance, Medicare measures how often home health patients must be admitted to the hospital. While sometimes unavoidable, in many cases, proper home health care can help avoid these costly visits by helping patients maintain better health. Nationally, the rate for this sort of hospitalization is nearly 30 percent. At Wright Memorial, that rate is just over 15 percent.
The 2006 Primaris Home Health Quality Award was presented to Wright Memorial Hospital Home Health and Hospice on on Wednesday, April 25, at the Missouri Alliance for Home Care annual meeting.
Hospital
St. John's Mercy Medical Center, St. Louis
When a team of health care experts reviewed candidates for the 2006 Primaris Hospital Quality Award, St. John's Mercy Medical Center came out on top. The award publicly acknowledges professional accomplishments in quality improvement and active collaboration with Primaris to improve healthcare in Missouri.
“Quality is essential to the healing environment of St. John’s Mercy,” said Denny DeNarvaez, president and CEO of St. John’s Mercy Health Care. “The remarkable commitment and collaboration among our physicians, nurses and other co-workers results in exceptional care for the patients we serve.”
The hospital receiving this award must rank among the highest in the state in quality of care on measures designated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Quality Award winners also demonstrate openness to their community through public reporting and show a true dedication to quality improvement through actively participating in Missouri quality improvement projects and collaboratives.
“St. John’s Mercy Hospital meets all of those needs. They’ve helped set the benchmarks for care in Missouri and, in fact, across the whole United States,” said Dana Lammert, Eastern Hospital Program Manager for Primaris.
St. John’s Mercy Medical Center performs above the national average in 20 of 21 nationally reported measures of clinical care. In addition, St. John’s Mercy Medical Center works intensively with various quality improvement projects. This includes both national campaigns, such as the Institute of Healthcare Improvement’s 100,000 Lives Campaign, as well as statewide efforts.
“While such projects pay off by improving care, they also require an investment of both time and staff. By making these commitments, St. John’s shows that both administrators and staff understand the value of constantly evolving care,” Royer said.
In addition to excellent care on CMS-reported measures, the hospital has nearly eliminated ventilator-associated pneumonia cases.
St. John’s Mercy Medical Center has also worked over the last few years toward lowering door-to-balloon time for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction patients who present at St. John’s and need primary PCI. Since September 2005, they have been at or below 100 minutes and continue to strive to lower the door-to-balloon time to 90 minutes.
Finally, the hospital demonstrates its value to the community through public reporting. Currently, St. John’s Mercy Medical Center publicly reports every measure suggested by the national Hospital Quality Alliance, a collaboration to improve hospital quality.
This year marks the second consecutive year the award has been given to a member of St. John’s Mercy Health Care. Last year’s award was given to its Washington, Mo., hospital, St. John’s Mercy Hospital.
Nursing Home
Parkview Healthcare Facility, Bolivar
When affecting culture change became a competition for a coveted plastic trophy, residents, staff and administrators at Parkview Healthcare Facility all took home the cup.
Parkview, a 78-bed facility in Bolivar, Mo. was designed in 1992 with pod-structured floor plan to foster communities of care, but it didn’t begin to fully live up to this vision until 2005. It was then that staff and administrators began working to create “neighborhoods” – units composed of a nurse manager, 15 staff members and as many as 30 residents.
These culture changes were taken to the next level with the help of Carolyn Spradlin, a Nursing Home Program Manager from Primaris. Spradlin helped create teams in each neighborhood devoted to reducing falls and high-risk pressure ulcers, assessing and managing pain, and keeping staff consistent in each neighborhood, said Tim Francka, Parkview’s administrative director of long term care.
With these “neighborhood” teams in place, improving quality has become a competition with staff competing for a traveling trophy inscribed “best of the best.”
Team-building activities helped promote buy-in throughout the organization and helped Parkview continue to target its main quality improvement goal – to reduce high-risk pressure ulcers – on multiple fronts. In 2006, education and new protocols were added for staff. Assessments were added to Parkview’s electronic documentation system, allowing care staff to continuously graph the healing process.
One nurse now measures, documents, photographs and reports pressure ulcers on a weekly basis, posting them where the entire staff can see them and track their progress. This is increasing accountability for in-house acquired pressure ulcers across the whole facility.
In a year’s time, high-risk pressure ulcers dropped from 13.33 percent – close to national and state averages – to a scant 3.33 percent. Francka said he attributes this dramatic reduction to culture change more than anything else.
Parkview staff and administrators not only worked with Primaris clinical staff on their quality improvement goals, they integrated them into the facility’s strategic plan in May 2006.
“Culture change and organizational stability are the two cornerstones of quality care. By building communities within their organization and keeping the same staff members assigned to the same residents, Parkview has helped make their nursing home exactly that, a home,” said Deborah Finley, director of nursing home services at Primaris.
“We made it an organization-wide effort,” Francka said. “It [quality data] goes up to our board of directors on a monthly basis. In order to reach the quality indicator, we had to make the culture change.”
Throughout 2006, staff developed plans to phase-in significant changes in regard to resident choice, furthering the community feeling for their residents. For example, a March 2006 staff plan for “Gentle Waking” allows residents choose when they wake and when they eat breakfast. As a response to resident feedback, a flexible lunch was added. The staff plan to further move residents away from institutional schedules “Bathing without a Battle” allows residents to choose the type and time of their bath.
“We don’t say ‘they refused their bath,’” said Kim Tatum, director of nursing. “We say they chose not to have their bath at that time. It’s about viewing things from a different perspective.”
In recognition of care quality and innovative efforts to promote and advance continual improvement, Parkview Healthcare Facility in Bolivar was awarded the Primaris Nursing Home Quality Award on July 6.Physician Office:
Esse Health, St. Louis Metropolitan
Approximately 300,000 Missourians suffer from diabetes, a chronic disease that requires careful attention to diet and exercise. A group effort to successfully manage the disease has earned recognition for physicians at Esse Health. On Monday, April 30, Primaris presented the St. Louis-based independent physician group with the Primaris Physician Office Quality Award.
The Primaris Physician Office Quality Awards are designed to publicly acknowledge high performance and a strong commitment to improving health care. This marks the second consecutive year that the award has been presented to a champion of diabetes care. It is only the first year that the award has been given to a physician group.
Esse Health was selected as the sole recipient of the Primaris Physician Office Quality Award for its integration of electronic medical records (EMR) to improve care management of its patients with diabetes.
Esse’s Disease Management Team used the system to collect data regarding all of their diabetic patients, allowing them to monitor the progress of large groups of patients in addition to seeing them one at a time. In addition, the group established the Practice Standards, a set of diagnosis criteria and treatment protocols that includes checks and prompts to ensure that nothing is overlooked when a diabetic patient visits.
“The Diabetic Health Report has improved our patients’ awareness of their own diabetes goals and they can now become more active participants in their health care,” said Esse Health physician Dr. Kathleen Brunts. “Our patients have seen substantial improvement in their blood sugar, blood pressure and weight.”
Electronic health records are the computer age’s answer to paper charts. They allow physicians to quickly and accurately recall information about their patients and are touted for their ability to save physicians both time and money. While most physicians have yet to add electronic records to their practice, Esse was an early adopter of the technology, starting to put them into practice in the late 1990s.
"While only a fraction of Missouri physician offices have made the switch from old paper and pen records, Esse Health’s system shows the potential that others are missing," said Richard A. Royer, CEO of Primaris. "Esse was quick to adopt this technology, carrying wireless laptops that allowed better care for patients, and they are quick to put it to its best use."
Because diabetes care requires patients to be very active in maintaining their health, Esse also started what they called Group Visits. During these visits, patients learned more about controlling diabetes as a group. Nearly all that attend the meetings regularly have shown significant improvement in controlling their diabetes.
With this diabetes management system in place, Esse plans to move next to developing care management systems for other chronic diseases.