SECTION II: Understanding Your Hospital Report - Statewide Reporting

STATEWIDE REPORTING - Does your hospital participate?

• Partnership for Health and Accountability (PHA) Initiatives:
  • PHA is a statewide program that brings together the Georgia Hospital Association, hospitals, providers, health care groups, payers, employers, and community leaders.
  • The goal of PHA is to make health care better and safer by promoting the use of evidence-based guidelines or other best practices that reduce medication errors and significant patient safety issues (falls, bedsores, wrong site surgery).
  • The program promotes voluntary sharing, studying, and learning from others to reduce the risk of errors or adverse outcomes.
  • As a requirement for participation in the PHA program, hospitals submit study data for 3 of 4 clinical focus areas that have been identified by The Joint Commission, and other national agencies such as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American Hospital Association (AHA).
• Collaborative Approach to Resource Effectiveness (CARE2)
  • CARE2: Looks at the results of care in all Georgia hospitals. Hospitals can use this to learn where they are doing well and where they can do better. Hospitals use CARE2 to help them:
    • Compare their results with other hospitals in their region, state, or country.
    • They study ways to improve care and treatment.
    • Share this information with national agencies such as The Joint Commission to show how they give quality care.
  • Other: Some hospitals in Georgia use other programs that provide similar information. These programs usually look at the information for only some hospitals in the nation. They are not able to see how they compare to all hospitals in Georgia.
• Office of Regulatory Services (ORS) - This is a state government agency that inspects hospitals to be sure they meet state rules.

Information from these programs let a hospital see if their changes are working to improve care.

Promoting Quality Care & Patient Safety

All hospitals in Georgia must follow the rules set by the government. Hospitals are visited by people from the government and inspected to make sure that it meets the rules for safe, quality care. While many hospitals study to learn better ways of giving care, Georgia hospitals do not stop there.

Georgia hospitals work together to make Georgia hospitals safer! Health can be improved when the best treatments are given to patients. When we know that a hospital is trying harder to do better, we can say that this hospital is becoming a "quality" hospital.