Explanation of Survey ResultsThe Michigan Health and Safety Coalition (MH&SC) developed guidelines for seven treatment areas and for care provided in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The areas of care included in the guidelines include: open heart surgery, percutaneouse coronary interventions, abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, carotid endarterectomy surgery, esophagectomy for cancer surgery, low birthweight infants, infants with congenital anomalies, and ICU. The MH&SC guidelines cover two major elements that have been shown to be related to patient safety and quality: 1) treatment area activities and 2) volume, or the number of each procedure the hospital has done. The survey results are not meant to represent a hospital's overall level of quality. Rather, the results are one piece of information to help patients make more informed decisions about receiving care for specific treatment areas. Results are displayed separately for each element, as follows: 1. Activity Scale: A five-bullet scale is used to indicate how closely each hospital follows the recommended activities portion of the guideline. Activities include such things as having and using criteria to determine the medical appropriateness of a procedure or service; having and using risk-adjusted data about the outcomes of care(such as complications and death rates) for each procedure; and the hospital's willingness to submit their data to a statewide database to help all hospitals better understand the activities that improve the safety and quality of care. The five-bullet scale is provided below: """"" Fully meets guideline 2. Volume: The light blue and dark blue bars compare the hospital's volume (top bar - light blue) to the MH&SC's recommended threshold (dark blue - bottom bar). For example, if the MH&SC recommended volume is 50 and a hospital scored 161, that would be represented as follows:
For more details about the scoring methods, weights assigned to different indicators of quality, and definition of acronyms, go to the: technical notes page. |
