Quality in Healthcare Institutions

It is essential to note that scholars frequently address the importance of quality as a topic of study (Fiscella & Sanders, 2016). Most of the time, customers have incredibly high expectations and are constantly raising their demands. Furthermore, it is crucial to recognize that patient health and well-being are of the utmost significance. The data obtained via the usage of assessments can be studied to find improvements that can be made to the customer experience. Giving patients the best care possible is the primary goal of any healthcare facility. Given that the patient’s health outcome would, in many situations, depend on the fast and effective healthcare help offered, this objective is crucial. In light of this, this research examines the metrics employed to gauge the standard of healthcare offered. The Baylor Scott and White Hospital, Metroplex Hospital, and the Seton Hospital are the three hospitals in the Temple (TX) area that are compared for the quality of the healthcare help they provide.

The quality measures analyzed

Analyzing the hospital’s service offerings and accessibility is one of the essential quality assurance methods (Medicare, 2018). The distance to the hospital is critical while dealing with an emergency, and it is crucial to keep this in mind. The services provided by the hospital, such as the ability to receive or track medical results electronically, and the existence of safety regulations, also help to raise patient satisfaction levels because they make it easier for patients to communicate with the hospital and foster greater patient confidence in it.

Patients’ perceptions of the level of care received and their ratings of the various hospitals make up a second important category of the quality indicators used to assess the hospitals. Medicare shares the findings from patient satisfaction surveys conducted at various hospitals to uniformly evaluate patient satisfaction (Medicare, 2018). These surveys include data on the following issues:

• If the patient had gotten assistance as soon as he requested it
• If the patient and the doctors and nurses have good communication
• If the patient’s suffering could have been comfortably managed
• If the hospital’s medical personnel had instructed the patient on how to utilize the medications before issuing them
• If the hospital’s amenities, including the patient’s room and restroom, were spotless
• The patient could relax if the patient’s room were quiet at night.
• The extent to which the patients comprehended instructions given after being discharged from the hospital and any necessary medical follow-ups.

The effectiveness of the care given and any required medical follow-ups, the frequency of complications and deaths, or the number of days spent in the hospital after the patient was initially discharged from the hospital are among the third major group of quality measures that are used to compare the level of care provided by various hospitals (Medicare, 2018). By ensuring that the patient is stable enough to be discharged from the hospital and avoiding problems from poor medical treatment, these metrics, taken collectively, evaluate the quality of the healthcare service offered.

The Baylor Scott and White Hospital

The integrated healthcare system Baylor Scott & White Healthcare, which is famous for fostering a culture of excellent patient care, is located in the northern part of Texas. Baylor Scott & White Healthcare was established following the 2013 merger of Scott & White Healthcare and Baylor Health Care System (BHCS). These two healthcare facilities merged to form a group that could be relied upon to offer and receive secure, excellent healthcare that is compassionate. It aims to give everyone individualized health and wellness, top-notch medical care, education, and research. Since the organization started attempting to raise the standard of its healthcare, more than a century has passed. The necessity of establishing a distinctive culture that would benefit all of its stakeholders is one of the lessons it has acquired throughout a century of travel.

The Baylor Scott & White hospital provides healthcare support to over 6,5 million people yearly through various healthcare institutions, ambulatory surgical centers, primary and specialized care clinics, and satellite outpatient facilities (Baylor Scott & White, 2017). The total number of beds (5,400), the annual number of hospital admissions (209,000), the annual number of babies born (31,400), the annual number of outpatient registrations (3.8 million), and the annual number of visits to the emergency room (900,000) are additional vital statistics that highlight the hospital’s enormous size. Considering these numbers, the hospital is the most extensive not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas and one of the newest in the country. It has 48 hospitals in various Texas locations and employs over 7,800 doctors and 48,000 nurses, as well as support and administrative employees (Baylor Scott & White, 2017).

Like other top healthcare facilities, the Baylor Scott & White Hospital is committed to giving its patients the best treatment possible. In this respect, the hospital aims to assist individuals and offer them first-rate health and wellness services. In addition to helping with medical needs, the hospital excels in other areas, including advancing medical research and healthcare education. From this vantage point, the healthcare facility’s mission is to provide and receive compassionate, high-quality treatment to anybody in need.

Notably, the hospital supports the following business principles to carry out such a mission:

• Integrity, through which hospital staff members give medical help per high ethical standards and acknowledge and respect patients to boost customer value
• Servanthood, whereby the hospital’s medical team works to provide the patients with the best care possible.
• The secret to effective team performance is teamwork, in which all team members are highly valued, leading to an excellent incentive for each member’s best performance.
• Excellence, through which the hospital fosters both high-quality medical treatment and a quality system that is continually improving.
• Creation of fresh thoughts, ideas, and chances to improve the patients’ existing high-quality medical treatment.
• Effective resource planning

The Seton and the Metroplex Hospitals

Seton Hospital is a part of Ascension, the largest not-for-profit healthcare system in the United States and the largest catholic healthcare system in the world. Seton’s mission and vision statements are focused on providing its patients with health care assistance and an integral approach, including spiritual assistance as needed, and establishing integrity and ethics as one of the core corporate values concerning what takes place at the Baylor Scott and White hospital. Furthermore, Seton promotes the education of healthcare professionals and, since 2016, has collaborated with the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas to run four teaching hospitals (Seton, 2016).

Conversely, Metroplex Hospital is the top healthcare system serving the Coryell, West Bell, and Lampasas counties (Metroplex, 2014). The multi-campus institution is a part of the Adventist Health System, a faith-based Christian organization that runs 42 hospitals and has over 55,000 employees. Adventist Health System is the tenth-largest hospital system in the United States. Dedicated to providing citizens with high-quality healthcare services, Metroplex has expanded quickly in recent years. The Metroplex hospital has 245 beds, far fewer than the Baylor Scott & White hospital, and its 1,200 physicians treat 125,000 patients annually (Metroplex, 2014).

The Three Hospitals’ Comparison

The fact that the three healthcare organizations are built on integrating patient care and advancing healthcare education is one fundamental commonality among them. The three hospitals are a part of much bigger healthcare systems. Since there will always be a hospital nearby, this integration makes it easier for people to receive treatment. In this respect, and as previously indicated, one of the significant variables impacting the quality of healthcare delivered, particularly in an emergency, is the distance to the healthcare facility.

However, although all three hospitals share some traits, they differ in several quality metrics examined in this study (Medicare, 2018). In order to determine if these hospitals offer lower, average, or more outstanding quality care than the others, the following sections highlight the main similarities and differences among them and compare them, whenever feasible, to the Texas and US average.

General Quality Measures Evaluation

The comparison of the three chosen hospitals’ performance on the general quality metrics is summarized in Table 1. These findings demonstrate that the services provided by Baylor Scott & White, Seton, and Metroplex hospitals are comparable. In this respect, all three hospitals offer emergency treatment and simple computerized delivery and monitoring of any test findings. Additionally, each of the three hospitals has implemented a quality system that uses safe surgical checklists for inpatient and outpatient procedures to validate the caliber of the medical aid offered. The Medicare hospital comparison website gives all three hospitals three stars as a consequence of these quality metrics.

Table 1. (Medicare, 2018)

Patient Surveys Evaluation

Table 2 shows the findings from the comparison between the three selected healthcare facilities and the national and state average (Texas) findings concerning the various themes covered in the patient satisfaction surveys. These results are related to the patient’s evaluation of the standard of medical care provided by the various facilities. The collected findings are a good indicator of the higher or lower quality of the healthcare supplied by the various institutions since they are drawn from numerous patient questionnaires, even though they are not an official measure of the quality of the healthcare delivered.

Table 2. Findings from the patient surveys (Medicare, 2018)

The three hospitals typically produce average ratings for the various concepts assessed in the patient satisfaction surveys, which is one of the key conclusions that can be drawn from examining the data in this table. Consequently, it is worth noting that few Baylor Scott & White hospital patients appear to believe they have ever received assistance as soon as feasible. The tiny percentage of patients who fully comprehended the care offered and what to do after leaving the hospital must be highlighted, even if all three hospitals provide results similar to those attained by both state and national averages (Medicare, 2018). Hospitals should think about giving their patients a more precise explanation of what to do to better care for themselves and their well-being in light of this knowledge.

Timely and effective care

The three chosen individuals excel in delivering prompt and efficient treatment. In contrast to the noticeably lower state and national statistics, most patients with intestinal issues, such as polyps, were promptly advised to undergo a colonoscopy as part of the diagnostic procedure.

Nonetheless, to improve the standard of healthcare delivered, the Metroplex hospital must carefully consider its issue with overcrowding in the emergency room. In this sense, the average wait time for pain medication in the emergency room following admission to the hospital with a fractured bone was 73 minutes, a significantly longer wait than the wait times at other hospitals or the regional and statewide norms (around 40-50 minutes).

Complications & deaths

The three institutions were chosen because, on average, they treat potential health issues to average or above-average levels and have reduced death rates. The Metroplex hospital does, however, offer better-than-average care for digestive problems brought on by Clostridium difficile. Conversely, compared to the other two hospitals, the national and state average, the Baylor Scott & White hospital had a reduced mortality rate for pneumonia patients.

Use of medical imaging

The least amount of MRI scans were performed on patients with low back pain at the Seton Hospital before receiving physiotherapy, which is the most notable deviation between the three chosen hospitals and the national average in terms of the utilization of medical imaging. Forty-five days following screening mammography, however, this hospital also exhibits a markedly greater rate of mammograms, MRIs, or breast ultrasounds, suggesting that the facility does an excessive amount of follow-up.

Unplanned readmissions and hospital returns

The average unplanned readmissions and hospital returns for the three chosen hospitals show that the quality of the medical treatment delivered is comparable to that of other hospitals. According to the Medicare data, Baylor Scott & White, on the other hand, has a more significant percentage of readmission days in heart attack patients, which may be used as a benchmark for better patient care.

Payment and value of care

The fact that all three of the chosen facilities are not-for-profit organizations may help to explain why the cost of the various treatments offered at the three healthcare facilities is either less than the national average or equivalent to it.

Conclusions

According to statistics released by Medicare, the three chosen hospitals usually offer more significant quality standards than the national or state average because they are committed to providing high-quality healthcare to their patients. The quality of the medical treatment delivered by hospitals might be improved by addressing a few significant-quality concerns. These fundamental problems include the protracted period from when a patient with a broken bone arrives at the Metroplex hospital and is given painkillers and the potential over-follow-up given to women following a screening mammogram. Every time there was a sizable difference between the hospitals’ quality indicators, the hospital gave higher-than-average treatment.

References

Baylor Scott & White. (2017). About Baylor Scott & White. https://www.bswhealth.com/about

Fiscella, K., & Sanders, M. R. (2016). Racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of health care. Annual review of public health, pp. 37, 375–394.

Medicare. (2018). Find and compare information about Hospitals | Hospital Compare. https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html

Metroplex. (2014). About us Metroplex Health System. https://www.mplex.org/aboutus.aspx

Seton Healthcare Family. (2016). About Seton. https://www.seton.net/about-seton/