Quality Awards
Delmarva Foundation
2008 Excellence Award for Quality Improvement
Purpose
Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care, Inc. (DFMC), Medicare’s Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for Maryland, has developed the 2008 Excellence Award for Quality Improvement for Hospitals. The purpose of the award is to recognize individual hospital performance improvement in the four national inpatient clinical areas – Acute Myocardial Infarction, Heart Failure, Surgical Care Improvement and Pneumonia. Any Maryland hospital that meets or exceeds the following criteria and requirements will be recognized as award winners.
What this Award Means to You
- Public recognition for your hard work and success.
- Increased credibility in the community.
- Peer recognition.
- Increased visibility for your quality improvement initiatives.
Criteria
- Improve individual performance measure rate to 90 percent or above on the 11 required measures to win the Excellence Award for Quality Improvement.
- Sustain improvement for at least three consecutive quarters.
- If a hospital has 10 or fewer cases in a single quarter, a summary of their cases across three quarters may be substituted.
Requirements (all applicants)
- Hospitals must complete and return the “Application for Award” form to DFMC. This application indicates the hospital commitment to improve performance on the required CMS quality indicators.
- Hospital must report at least 22 measures to the Hospital Quality Alliance.
- Hospitals must achieve a minimum CDAC validation score of 80 percent for data.
- Data collection sample sizes for AMI, Pneumonia, CHF and SCIP will be the same as required by JCAHO.
- Hospital must schedule a conference call with their DFMC Quality Improvement Consultant (QIC) to discuss award requirements and criteria, review the performance measures, and complete all required paperwork for QIO Warehouse submission.
- Hospital must submit, to the DFMC QIC, the Quarterly Documentation Improvement Form describing changes implemented to improve care, barriers identified, and lessons learned while implementing changes.
- Previous applicants must re-apply annually.
- Data from the four quarters of 2007 will be used for 2008 Award.
- Quarters of data used to win an award in the previous year may not be used to win the current year’s award.
Other
- DFMC will coordinate all press activities around the conference and award presentation.
- Hospital’s name and accomplishments will be listed on the Maryland QIO website.
- Optional measures have been added for 2008 that will be required for the 2009 Excellence Award for Quality Improvement. These measures include antibiotic selection, antibiotic discontinuance, VTE prevention, appropriate beta blocker usage for SCIP, and Influenza Vaccination for pneumonia. Hospitals will also need to report the 24 Hospital Quality Alliance HQA measures for the 2009 award.
