Program Targets Hospital Injuries and Complications

OAK BROOK, Ill. — The Federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced $218 million in awards to 26 state, regional, national or hospital organizations as part of a public-private collaboration to reduce the millions of preventable injuries and complications from healthcare-acquired conditions.

The funds, a part of the Partnership for Patients program, designates Hospital Engagement Networks who are tasked to identify processes that already work to reduce healthcare-acquired conditions and share the solutions with other hospitals and health care providers.

Hospital Engagement Networks will receive $500 million from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center, which was established by the Affordable Care Act.

Launched in April 2011, the Partnership for Patients program consists of more than 6,500 hospitals, employers, health plans and others in the healthcare industry that pledged to reduce the number of hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent and reduce hospital readmission rates by 20 percent by the end of 2013.

Achieving the Partnership for Patients’ objectives would result in about 1.8 million fewer injuries to hospital patients, saving more than 60,000 lives over three years, and would mean more than 1.6 million patients recovered from illness without suffering a preventable complication requiring re-hospitalization, according to a statement from the Joint Commission of Resources (JCR), a not-for-profit affiliate of The Joint Commission and an expert resource for health care organizations.

“At some point in our lives many of us are going to need hospital care and we need to be confident that no matter where we live, we’re going to get the best care in the world,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “The Partnership for Patients is helping the nation’s finest health systems share their knowledge and resources to make sure every hospital knows how to provide all of its patients with the highest quality care.”

Hospital Engagement Networks will work to develop learning collaboratives for hospitals and provide a wide array of initiatives and activities to improve patient safety. They will be required to conduct intensive training programs to teach and support hospitals in safe patient care; provide technical assistance that enables hospitals to achieve quality measurement goals; and establish and implement a system to track and monitor hospital progress in meeting quality improvement goals. CMS will closely monitor Hospital Engagement Networks’ activities to ensure that they are improving patient safety.

As a Hospital Engagement Network, JCR will select and work with 50 hospitals in many states to implement performance improvement strategies. JCR will collaborate and innovate with the other network awardees to achieve the Partnership for Patients objectives and to ultimately make care safer, more reliable and less costly.

Under JCR’s leadership, several other organizations will support the education, improvement and measurement activities of JCR’s Hospital Engagement Network project, including The Joint Commission’s Division of Healthcare Quality Evaluation, The Patient Safety Education Program housed at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, HealthCare Team Training LLC, EnCompass LLC, and Social Interventions and Research Inc.