SALT LAKE CITY — CHRISTUS Saint Joseph Villa received the HealthInsight Quality Award at the Utah Health Care Association annual conference Sept. 30. Saint Joseph Villa was recognized for their high performance on publicly reported quality of care data. "What is so neat about this award is that this is the second year in a row we have received it," said Galen Ewer, administrator and chief executive officer of CHRISTUS Saint Joseph Villa. The name of the organization is HealthInsight, and they are what is known as a quality improvement organization. They are a Medicare contractor, and their responsibility is for quality health care improvement in virtually all providers, which includes physicians, hospitals, home care agencies, as well as nursing facilities. They are based in Salt Lake City, but their contract includes Utah and Nevada." The portion of what Saint Joseph Villa does for this award is their long-term care and transitional care units. This award was for Utah facilities, of which Saint Joseph Villa was one of seven recipients. There were three components HealthInsight reviewed to make the decision. The first part is a pre-screening process that HealthInsight completes based on the publicly reported quality data. This is information submitted on every resident to the State of Utah, who in turn produce reports to compare their quality outcome with those of other facilities. The measures include the percentage of residents given the influenza vaccination, who were assessed and given the pneumococcal vaccination, whose need for help with daily activities had increased, and who have moderate to severe pain. They also measure residents who are physically restrained, who are more depressed or anxious, who lose control of their bowels and bladder, and who have a catheter, who spend most of their time in bed, whose ability to move around in their room has gotten worse, residents with a urinary tract infection, and who lose too much weight. "There are 11 categories they reviewed to compare our outcomes to other facilities. In order to meet the minimum qualifications, we had to be in the top 25 percent in the nation," said Ewer. "In this past year, we were actually in the top eight percent. Ewer said the second part was to demonstrate they were involved in working to improve the health of the broader community. "Our Director of Nursing Karie Jones worked on a project to improve the reduction of pressure sores between hospitals and nursing homes," said Ewer. "We really need to have a good working relationship between us and the hospital. She was very involved in looking at the continuum of care in how we improved this working relationship. "The third component is our internal improvement program," said Ewer. "We had to show them some of the efforts that we have made to improve quality of care within Saint Joseph Villa. "One of the things we did was the result of discovering that increased personal knowledge between a caregiver and a resident or patient can result in improved care," said Ewer. "So one of our steps was to assure that we had consistent staffing assignments. For example, a caregiver that is assigned to a particular resident is assigned to that resident or patient consistently so they begin to understand the person better. If something changes, they are more apt to recognize it. The caregivers are certified nursing aids, or charged nurses." Ewer said in addition, Saint Joseph Villa has started what is referred to as multi-disciplinary rounds. The staff will respond to different situations and will have, not only just the nursing department, but also someone from housekeeping, a dietician, and other disciplines who will all review the situation to make an assessment to assure there is a multi-disciplinary approach to the situation. This gives a comprehensive picture of different situations, and assures the situation will be taken care of correctly. "Many times something that a housekeeper will notice, a nurse might not have thought of, just from going into the room from a completely different perspective," said Ewer. It becomes complicated when so many different pieces have to be put together. Also, the medical field is so much more technical than it was a few years ago, that many of the people who live here now would have been in the hospital in the past. So it is a continuously changing environment that we are needing to increase our technical expertise. But it still comes back to that, sometimes very basic, personal understanding of the individual to meet their needs. Ewer said another factor that is included is patient and family satisfaction. "We utilize an outside company to assess this aspect," said Ewer. "The company has at least 500 clients, and we consistently rank in the top 10 percent among clients with the satisfaction surveys." Saint Joseph Villa is one of only three facilities in the state of Utah that is accredited by the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. There are only approximately eight percent nationally that meet the accreditation criteria. The HealthInsight program was created in 2004, to recognize providers who achieve a high level of performance on publicly reported quality of care data and to promote transparency in the healthcare system. A transparent healthcare system makes all information flow freely so that anyone involved, including residents and families, can make the most informed decisions.
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