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Who Can You Trust?
You want and deserve the best health care available for yourself and your family, but how do you know what’s best? What information is meaningful in making important choices about health care providers?
As it becomes easier to find data on the Internet about health care “quality” and “outcomes,” it becomes more difficult to know what that data is telling you.
Not only is INTEGRIS Health providing this information, we are also working to help you understand exactly what you're seeing.
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Accountability and Transparency
At INTEGRIS Health, our goal is to be both accountable and transparent to our patients and the public. What do we mean by that? Being accountable means being “responsible” or “answerable.” We intend to take responsibility for how we care for patients and be answerable for the same. “Transparency” is the full, accurate and timely disclosure of information. That means telling you the whole story, truthfully, and in a timely way, about what we do.
Are we perfect in every area? No. But we're working toward that goal and we're even providing information regarding how we're doing just that.
INTEGRIS has historically been the community leader in consumer confidence and trust. This Web site, though a work in progress, represents our intention to continue to earn that reputation of excellence.
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What is Important to Know?
In health care, we measure quality by structure, process and outcome. What does that mean? Structure is the environment in which health care is provided, process is the method by which health care is provided, and outcome is the consequence of the health care provided.
What are some examples of these measures? A measure of structure would be the nurse-to-patient ratio. In other words, how well staffed are we? A process measure is one you’ll see on this Website: how often do patients having a heart attack receive an aspirin upon arrival in the Emergency Room? Outcome measures have to do with things like success rates: how many patients who undergo coronary artery bypass graft surgery leave the hospital alive? You might quickly see that these measurements become very complex, and that an important issue is how sick a patient is when he or she arrives at the hospital for treatment. In order to account for this variation, many measurement systems use "risk adjustment."
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Risk Adjustment
The purpose of risk adjustment is to obtain fair statistical comparisons between disparate populations or groups. Significant differences in demographic and clinical risk factors are found among patients treated in different hospitals. Risk adjustment of the data is needed to make accurate and valid comparisons of clinical outcomes at different hospitals.
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95% or Better
Most of the measures you'll see on our Website are process measures. In other words, they tell you how often we are doing what evidence-based medicine tells us we should do for patients with certain medical conditions. Because of the challenges with this kind of data collection, we consider we are doing reasonably well if our numbers are 95 percent or better, but our ultimate goal is to do things right, 100 percent of the time.
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