The Commonwealth Fund: Why Not the Best?

Anne-Marie J. Audet, M.D., MSc, SM, Vice President, Quality Improvement and Efficiency, the Commonwealth Fund, New York City and Ramanathan Raju, M.D., Executive Vice President, New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. Dr. Raju discusses how New York Health and Hospitals Corporation has used quality measures, benchmarking data to compare and trend performance over time throughout the corporation, and how a culture of internal and external transparency has led to real breakthrough in improvements. Dr Raju discusses the challenges of assessing performance on an ongoing basis, such as data access issues, trending data consistently, finding meaningful benchmarks and finally accessing resources and tools that can be used to improve quality. Dr. Audet reviews a new web tool , Why Not The Best, developed by The Commonwealth Fund (www.WhyNotTheBest.org) which gives hospital leaders comprehensive data to measure and improve performance. The site offers easily accessible, comparative information on hospital performance and composite measures, clinical measures and patient satisfaction measures, trends, and side-by-side comparisons of over 4,300 U.S. hospitals (publicly available data from CMS Hospital Compare). Users can search by hospital characteristics, e.g. bed size, teaching, safety net, and select benchmarks (top 1%, 10%, state and national). The site also offers case studies of top-performing hospitals and a library of improvement resources. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with the site and provide feedback. Learn about how a large hospital system has used ongoing measurement, trends and benchmarks and evolved a culture of internal and external transparency, where data are shared publicly to demonstrate significant impact on quality; and learn how your organization can benefit from a new no-charge service from the Commonwealth Fund to jump start your measurement and improvement initiatives.