Becker's Hospital Review

68 CARE DELIVERY Data Where You Might Not Expect: Johns Hopkins Medicine Goes Performance-Transparent With Dashboards By Max Green H ospitals are constantly having their data collected, combed through and compared. Whether in quality and safety databases or financial rankings and credit ratings, third parties like U.S News & World Report and federal organizations like CMS are watching to see how health systems stack up against one another. Some hospitals are taking data collection into their own hands, getting a better perspective and diving deeper to drive improvements. Two years ago, Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine decided to paint a more informed picture of the perfor- mance of its five hospitals by rolling out a dashboard that collects data on a number of quality and safety metrics within the system, organizing it in one place. Making quality data available to staff To drive improvements in patient outcomes and employee performance at the micro level, for individuals and their units, the database gathers information and metrics pertaining to hos- pital-acquired infections, core measures from CMS and e Joint Commission, HCAHPS results, hand hygiene performance and measures of patient experience, among others. Johns Hopkins' 41,000 employees can visit the dashboard to view their individual performance numbers, as well as overall hospital ratings. "I think an area where we've really benefited from the dash- board is around HCAHPS," says Matt Austin, PhD, professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins' Arm- strong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. "We've had a large, systemwide focus on HCAHPS in the last 12 to 18 months, and the ability to easily share unit-level information across a large en- terprise has really been helpful in both having everyone under- stand where we are and improving performance." e goal of the internal dashboard is to share key quality and safety measures with the aim of being able to look at data all the way down to unit-level performance, Dr. Austin says. "We feel like real change happens at an individual unit level, so where we can share that data, our experience has been that's what will drive the greatest improvements." Going public with performance data More recently, the health system implemented an exter- nal-facing dashboard, including much of the same information, which is accessible to patients and anyone curious about Johns Hopkins Medicine's performance. e health system has four major goals in making perfor- mance data visible to the public. e first is to hold itself account- able to patients, their families and the communities it serves. If the hospital makes claims about its performance measures and how they stack up against competitors, what better way to reassure pa- tients those claims are true than by displaying the numbers? Second, the dashboard consolidates all of the disparate data about Johns Hopkins into one place — when patients seek infor- mation about a hospital or health system online, they are inundated with reviews, numbers and measures of performance that may not be from credible sources. Patients might also be hunting for a spe- cific measure of performance and having a hard time finding it. e dashboard is a one-stop shop for all of the data that is available. ird, there is a market demand for this type of transparency and information consolidation. Not only did Johns Hopkins see its competitors undertaking similar initiatives, but patients also indicated that a tool like this would be very helpful to them, and the system wanted to engineer a way to collect all the safety and quality data that might help them make better informed decisions about care in one place. Lastly, taking full ownership of all of its measures and orga- nizing them in one place enables Johns Hopkins to create a narra- tive around the data. "It allows us to talk directly to our patients about why the data are important and what we're continuing to do to improve our performance in each of the areas," Dr. Austin says. Unintended benefits of sharing performance data Beyond giving patients a direct line to important hospital data, the dashboards allow Johns Hopkins officials to track per- formance on whatever measures they see fit in one place. If there's a particular area that CMS doesn't require the system to report on, Johns Hopkins still has a platform to gather information and improve on that data point. "It's a feedback loop, it's understanding where performance is, being able to understand when interventions are put into place and seeing how performance changes over time," he says. "One of the pieces of feedback we've gotten from employees of Johns Hopkins Medicine is they are really interested in being able to compare their unit's performance to another unit's performance, and we're working on a functionality to would allow for that." In that sense, Dr. Austin says the decision to go live with the internal dashboard has given hospital staff more of a voice about the tools they'd like to have at their disposal and the steps admin- istration can take to help them improve. It has also encouraged a healthy sense of competition and spurred cultural change. "One of the things we have seen is a greater awareness of per- formance and how we're doing in quality and safety. We've been creating a culture of data where people are comfortable talking about data and making decisions about data," he says. "at's a big cultural change for us." n

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