Quality Measurements Garner Best Practices Honor From AAMI's TMC

Abstract

The clinical engineering department at Arkansas Childrens’ Hospital knew it was on track when it came to customer service and financial performance, but quality remained a question mark. “We were getting few complaints, and we could always prove that we could meet the budget,” says Boyd Hutchins, director of clinical engineering for the hospital. “As far as measuring quality, we didn’t have a way to do that.” Hutchins and his colleagues bridged that knowledge gap by launching a two-year effort to define quality and develop measurable benchmarks to demonstrate the department’s success. The program was so successful that it was featured in BI&T’s Best Practices column in May/June 2009, and now AAMI’s Technology Management Council (TMC) has voted it the 2009 Best Practices winner. As a result of the quality system program, benchmarks were developed to reflect individual technician performance and a financial performance benchmark score for their services. The department also created a flat screen “dashboard” that posts all of the quality indicators. “One of the things our chief executive officer wanted us to prove is that you can take something off a contract and increase the quality of service,” Hutchins says. “That is when we got the go-ahead to build this thing and quantify what we are doing.” Since the article was published, Hutchins says that his department has linked human factors data such as operator errors into the dashboard. The next step was to incorporate the data into the patient safety arena by tracking occurrence reports, he says. “The system is built to be very flexible. As long as we can measure it and collect the data, we can do something in our system.” Kevin Haralson, assistant director of clinical engineering, will discuss the quality system program during the “Best of BI&T” session from 9:45 to 11 a.m. on Monday, June 28 at the AAMI Annual Conference & Expo in Tampa. n Quality Measurements Garner Best Practices Honor From AAMI’s TMC