Challenges to Performance-Based Assessment for Community Physicians

Quality improvement and pay for performance: barriers to and strategies for success

Linking health-care quality improvement to payment appears straightforward. Improve the care that one provides to one's patients, and one is rewarded financially. Should one fail to improve care, then one is financially penalized. However, this strategy assumes that health-care workers and administrators possess the necessary tools and knowledge to improve care and that the metrics being measured have been rigorously tested. Although health-care workers and hospitals are publically committed to reducing inappropriate care, improving patient safety, achieving better health outcomes, and holding down costs, many are unsure how to do this effectively. We present the case that it is not usually the people who create the problems in our health system; rather, it is the processes of the care-delivery system that require change. Incentivizing performance improvement using simple metrics is unlikely to work before using compensation strategies to incentivize behavior change in clinical systems. But prior to even doing this, leaders and physicians must first create accurate performance measures and understand improvement science.

Transforming safety and effectiveness in pediatric hospital care locally and nationally

Achieving dramatic, sustainable improvements in the safety and effectiveness of care for children requires a transformational approach to how hospitals individually focus on improvement and learn from each other to achieve national goals. The authors describe a theoretic framework for transformation that includes setting system-level priorities, aligning measures with each priority, identifying breakthrough targets, testing interventions to get results, and spreading successful interventions throughout the organization. Essential key drivers of transformation include leadership, building will, transparency, a business case for quality, patient and family engagement, improvement infrastructure, improvement capability, and reliability and standardization. Improving national system-level measures requires each hospital to pursue its own transformation journey while collaborating with hospitals and other organizations.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center: Transforming Care for Children and Families

BACKGROUND

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center pursues its vision to be the leader in improving child health through the creation of new knowledge, education of professionals and the community, and transformation of our health care delivery system.

OVERALL APPROACH TO QUALITY AND SAFETY

The strategic plan focuses on achieving the best medical and quality of life outcomes, patient and family experience of care, and value through horizontal integration of research and delivery system design, thereby accelerating the transfer of new knowledge to the bedside.

CREATING QUALITY FROM THE FAMILY PERSPECTIVE

Family members and patients participate at all levels of the organization, from the organizationwide family advisory council, to unit-based inpatient teams, to serving as family faculty who teach pediatric residents and orient new employees. Family members ensure that children's and parents' voices are heard.

DISCUSSION

Key factors contributing to ongoing transformation include senior leaders' drive for change, focus on perfection or near-perfection goals, vertical alignment in measures, accountability, improvement capability, commitment to internal and external transparency, and focus on measurement and constancy of purpose.