Six years ago, Northwell’s Mather Hospital’s CMS rating hovered around three and four stars until leaders made reaching five-star status part of their strategic plan for their “little community hospital,” Kevin McGeachy, president of Mather Hospital, said in an upcoming “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” episode.
“It’s been a great rallying cry for us around the CMS five-star rating,” Mr. McGeachy said. “It’s really become part of the mantra and continued culture of the hospital here. And the baseline we worked from was a strong, compassionate and engaged workforce that we’ve had here as well.”
Leaders focused efforts in three areas: readmissions, patient experience and patient safety.
Utilizing a small group, the hospital was able to reduce readmissions to one of the lowest rates in the country, going from about 15% readmission rate to 7% overall readmissions.
“When we were able to show success on that, it really permeated the organization — it showed that our efforts every day were paying off, that what we were doing was working, and it’s something we need to continue to pay attention to,” he said. “There’s been a financial benefit for us as well, because we were leaving a significant amount of money on the table with the federal government by getting penalized on our readmission rate. That’s a mantra I’d tell people: we’re just giving away money — money we could reinvest back into the institution. For the last three or four cycles, we’ve been able to avoid any readmission penalty.”
In patient safety, the hospital used a triad that included an administrator, a nurse and a physician lead to oversee patient safety incidents and make changes. This triad, along with monthly committee meetings, helped reduce patient safety incidents.
Mather Hospital has been recognized with Healthgrades’ outstanding patient experience for six years in a row and recently became one of 16 triple crown winners. Dr. McGeachy said it’s all thanks to the hospital staying “relentlessly focused” on patient experience.
Now leaders are focused on maintaining their success.
Want to be a five-star hospital?
Mr. McGeachy has three pieces of advice for leaders looking to improve their hospital CMS rating.
1. Start with a healthy focus on your employees and engagement. “I don’t think there’s a hospital that does well on any of their outcome measurements without a highly engaged workforce as a bedrock principle — that’s something we pay critical attention to,” he said.
2. Understand your data by unit so you can dig into and parse it apart, and understand where there are opportunities to improve. “I always believe you want to solve good problems: put your best people on your biggest problems, give them guardrails, and get out of their way, but charge them with improving that.”
3. Discuss quality and safety at every meeting. “You have to pay constant attention to it — it has to be top of mind every single day.”
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