The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum have recognized two health systems and one physician for standout patient safety efforts.
Every year, the two organizations hand out the John M. Eisenberg awards, which highlight innovation in clinical quality and safety in three categories: on the national level, on a local level and for individual achievement, according to a May 12 news release. The awards were launched in 2022.
Here are the 2024 honorees:
1. Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health was honored with the National Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality award for its innovative approach to achieving and sustaining clinical excellence. The system prioritized three areas: heart failure, maternal hypertension and catheter-associated urinary tract infections. The hospital’s improvement model helped reduce hospital and heart failure mortality and disparities in care. This program improved care for more than 409,130 patients over three years and prevented more than 2,700 harm events across 99 acute care hospitals.
2. Dallas-based Parkland Health was honored with the Local Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality award. It developed a comprehensive surveillance program to address missed opportunities in diagnosis. It focused on delayed imaging findings and used an AI language model to achieve 97.2% accuracy in identified delays. It also implemented a population health management tool, bilingual staff trained in motivational interviewing and integration of social workers. The results:
- Achieved completed recommended follow-up studies in 91% of patients with abnormal imaging studies, with 4.3% of completed cases being found to have cancer and 3% to have a medical issue requiring surgical intervention.
- Delays in overdue imaging surveillance findings decreased from 17% to 9%.
- Follow-up rates for abnormal mammograms improved from 83% to 87%.
- Abnormal tumor marker follow-up gaps decreased by 27%.
3. Elliott Main, MD, a clinical professor in obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford (Calif.) University School of Medicine, received the award for Individual Achievement. Dr. Main co-founded state and national-level quality improvement collaboratives for maternal health; led the formation of the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health; helped develop state perinatal quality collaboratives across 49 states; led research to establish four national perinatal care metrics used by both The Joint Commission and CMS; led the development of obstetric quality improvement toolkits and national safety bundles; and led the creation of the Maternal Data Center, which provides timely and low-burden outcome data and analysis to hospitals across California, Oregon and Washington.
