Our Culture of Quality & Safety

Quality & Safety at Baystate Health

Safety is about eliminating preventable mistakes, guarding against the impact of human error, and having systems that safeguard the health and well-being of patients, their loved ones, and our Baystate Health staff.

When you choose a Baystate Health hospital or facility for medical care or a place to work, you want to be sure we can provide:

• Successful, healthy outcomes
• Expert and advanced medical care
• Safe, error-free care
• Comfort and peace of mind

Baystate Health and our largest hospital, Baystate Medical Center, have won many quality and safety awards. These awards show how we continuously measure and improve our care, including ways to increase survival rates and patient safety.

How Baystate Health Defines Quality

Like many hospitals, we use several widely accepted definitions of healthcare quality.

Credentials

Baystate Health hospitals are accredited by the Joint Commission. This accreditation is a nationwide symbol of quality.

Our physicians are board-certified in their specialties.

Research & Education

• Research and education should be a hospital priority. And teaching hospitals tend to have better health outcomes.
• Baystate Health is the regional campus of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, a respected research institution.
• Baystate Medical Center is a clinical site for nursing and many other healthcare professions in western Massachusetts.

Patient Health Outcomes

Quality hospitals have a positive record of patient health outcomes, such as how often the hospital performs a given procedure. Higher volumes result in more favorable:

• Mortality rates
• Complication rates
• Average lengths of stay

Patient Safety

Keeping patients safe includes having structures in place to reduce preventable mistakes. These are some of the interventions we have in place at Baystate Health:

• A computerized physician order entry system—to more effectively and accurately order medications, tests, and procedures
• ICU staffing — an intensive care unit staffed by intensivists, doctors and other caregivers with special training in critical care.
• Evidence-based hospital referral — a record of the most experience and best results performing procedures and surgeries or treating conditions. Medical literature shows the more experience a doctor or hospital has performing a given procedure, the better the results.

Measuring Quality & Safety

Our emphasis is on understanding why and how events happen, not who caused a particular error. Only once we have that information can we keep that error from happening again.

Several national organizations, including the Joint Commission and Hospital Compare, compare outcomes and other quality measures at hospitals and medical practices across the United States. While it’s not possible to compare one patient's experience from one hospital to the next, comparing mortality or complication rates can show the relative quality of care from one institution to the next.

It’s also possible to assess and understand the process of care, which is what happens to patients when they’re in the hospital. Hospitals with good quality of care generally uphold higher standards of quality and safety when caring for their patients. And hospitals with strong quality of care programs should be able to measure their outcomes and share that data with patients and other hospitals.

We believe in open reporting of outcomes and quality measures. To help ensure we continue to deliver safe, high-quality care, our Division of Healthcare Quality measures, evaluates and reports outcomes and events that show how well Baystate is doing.

Baystate Health Division of Healthcare Quality

Our Division of Healthcare Quality (DHQ) works to ensure our patients receive quality, efficient and safe care, by:

• Identifying and improving the way we measure quality of care
• Coordinating quality and performance improvement activities, such as patient safety practices, infection control and prevention, and delivering high quality, population-based care
• Documenting and reporting quality and safety results data
• Conducting research into ways to improve Baystate quality of care and patient safety through the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science
• Applying research to support performance improvement, such as computerized physician order entry, benchmarking databases, and safety reporting systems
• Tracking Baystate's accreditations, awards and ratings

Each quarter, the DHQ voluntarily shares Baystate Health data to several organizations, including:

• Hospital Compare
• Joint Commission core measures