During a June CPR Week webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review and sponsored by the American Heart Association, moderator Erica Carbajal, lead cardiology writer at Becker’s Hospital Review, led a discussion on in-hospital resuscitation efforts and the business implications with a panel of healthcare experts:
- Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association
- Ashish Panchal, MD, PhD, emergency medicine physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus)
- Stephanie Proffitt, RN, clinical education manager, resuscitation at Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City)
Four key takeaways:
1. COVID-19 forced hospitals to change how they approached resuscitation. With the guidance of the American Heart Association, healthcare organizations quickly made modifications to established resuscitation practices and processes, but changes to these life-saving approaches aren’t just for the pandemic. “One of the big steps the AHA made when it comes to the concept of resuscitation is establishing a new standard,” Dr. Panchal said. “The standard is verified competency with a new, clear standard of care, which is something different than we see in a lot of places.”
2. Resuscitation quality improvement programs are key to highly effective CPR training. American Heart Association’s RQI program focuses on verified competency by delivering short bursts of case-based quarterly training to support mastery of high-quality CPR skills. The RQI program gives healthcare providers the confidence and competency to respond with life-saving patient care. At The Ohio State University, RQI enables staff to spend a mere 10 minutes during a shift training at a psychomotor station, decreasing time spent away from their jobs and increasing compliance to 90 percent. This also drives down labor costs; hospitals no longer pay one employee to spend a shift in training while another staff member covers the entire shift.
3. Sharing and reporting data with other hospital systems furthers quality of care. The Association’s Get With The Guidelines program facilitates the efficient capture, analysis and reporting of clinical quality improvement data across more than 2,500 U.S. hospitals and hospital systems. Coupled with RQI, Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation allows hospitals to understand how their quality of care compares to other hospital systems and, ultimately, helps hospitals improve. Successes are shared with other hospital systems so that all participating hospitals can learn from and implement those solutions. “Initiatives like Get With The Guidelines are valuable tools for all of us to ensure that quality of care is high,” Ms. Brown said.
4. Resuscitation quality programs positively affect the hospital as a business. “It really does help an organization to be able to improve and bring on evidence-based practice with real-time feedback,” Ms. Proffitt said of the AHA programs. Healthcare systems using the Get With The Guidelines and RQI programs are seeing a positive effect, not just in life-saving patient care, but in operating efficiencies, improved quality and increased patient satisfaction. “This creates operational efficiency that can reduce risk and save money for healthcare systems as well,” Ms. Brown said.
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