The Hospital Quality Initiative is an effort by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) designed to improve the quality of care in hospitals. The effort also provides consumers with access to quality measure information to assist with hospital selections. Consumer information about hospitals is available on www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, by going to www.medicare.gov and selecting Compare Hospitals in Your Area, or by calling toll-free anytime, 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).
HQSI’s objective is to help hospitals achieve statewide improvement on the CMS national quality indicators. CMS has partnered with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) to align their healthcare indicators, which include the following clinical areas:
- Acute myocardial infarction
- Heart Failure
- Pneumonia
- Surgical Care Improvement Project
Quality Improvement Activities and Resources
HQSI offers the following quality improvement activities and resources:
- Collaborative projects that assist hospitals in using rapid cycles to test process changes while sharing experiences with peer hospitals
- Teleconferences/Web-based seminars with presentations from clinical experts and benchmark hospitals
- Suggestions for intervention tools
- Identification of benchmark care processes from hospitals with demonstrated success in improving performance on the quality indicators
- Distribution of data reports that provide a comparison of a hospital to hospitals in New Jersey
Data Abstraction
HQSI has been actively involved in providing technical assistance with data abstraction.
Data Submission
HQSI and New Jersey hospitals use Quality Net (QNet) Exchange, an interactive website that provides for the exchange and input of privacy data. It give hospitals and HQSI the ability to securely exchange data files of any type via the Internet while maintaining HIPAA compliance.