Dallas Board Sets Sights on Public Reporting of WSM
January 23, 2010
Posted by chcablogadmin in : Quality
We enjoyed having Chris Durovich here with us Thursday for his CHCA Board orientation. I thought it timely to share thoughts from Fiona Levy, M.D., vice president of quality, about using Whole System Measures at the hospital Board level. — Don
Fiona Levy, M.D.
Children’s Medical Center Dallas has been actively involved in the Whole System Measures (WSM) project from its inception, participating in its development and advocating for adoption. Thanks to everyone’s input across CHCA hospitals, I believe WSM are enhancing our system for assessing quality of care.
We recently formally introduced WSM to our hospital Board, through its Quality Committee. Individual Board members, as well the committee as a whole, responded very favorably to the opportunity to review our hospital’s performance as compared to other institutions by their own report. I believe it helped them anchor and clarify the data and how to interpret them. The WSM seem to have served as an effective tool in our effort to increase/improve Board member engagement in oversight of quality. Any concern about sharing data when our performance was sub-optimal or below mean proved unfounded as we were met with interest and engagement, not admonition.
Our next challenge/goal will be to consistently report our performance on our intranet and then on our external site. In addition, we plan to modify our current dashboard to include all prior and retiring definitions/measures as appropriate. Eventually we have our sights set on using WSM as a foundation for our public reporting of performance.
Questions: Tell us about your experience in applying WSM. Is your hospital using WSM at the Board level? What other benchmarking methods have been effective for your hospital? What are your plans to publicly report WSM performance?
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