AF4Q Hospital Quality Network

AF4Q Hospital Quality Network

Communications Resources

Table of Contents

Overview of Communications Activities Planned

Communications Support – In Brief

Talking About the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network

Key Messages and Talking Points About the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network

Key Messages and Talking Points About Reducing Readmissions

Key Messages and Talking Points About Increasing Throughput

Key Messages and Talking Points About Improving Language Services

Key Messages and Talking Points About Aligning Forces for Quality

AF4Q Style Guide and Logo Usage

References to the Program

Boilerplates and Logos

Releases, Publications and Web Sites

Communications-Related Queries

Template PowerPoint Presentation

Template PowerPoint Presentation

AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Maps

All AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Hospitals and Programs

AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Reducing Readmissions Hospitals

AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Increasing Throughput Hospitals

AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Improving Language Services Hospitals

Overview of Communications Activities Planned

Communications Support – In Brief

Communications activities for the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network will occur in three distinct phases over the course of the three programs (Readmissions, Language and Throughput):

Selection/kick-off announcement and events
Mid-point activities
Conclusion events

Through each of these key points, for each of the three efforts, hospitals will engage in the following:

Dedicated communications-only focused webinars – Webinar for hospitals organized and led by Technical Assistance (TA) providers reviewing activities that will be taking place and communications support available.
Kits or packets of template materials – Packets of easily customizable communications materials for hospitals to use during each phase will be created and distributed following webinar.
Ongoing support for the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network via an online Forum and a dedicated email address to collect and respond to communications issues.

Timing for activities will occur at the beginning, middle and end of the 18-month programs:

APPROX. TIMING / COMMUNICATIONS ACTIVITIES PHASE
Oct 2010 / 1. Selection announcement and kick-off

Participate in webinar on selection announcement and kick-off events and receive toolkit (including messages, style guide, etc.).
NPO and TA providers provide follow up and support with AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Forum and dedicated email address to collect questions/comment related to selection/kick-off.

Jul 2011 / 2. Mid-point

Participate in webinar on mid-point events and receive toolkit. These optional events will be a single informal event bringing together all the Hospital Quality Network participants across each community and is designed to help them all think about “where you are” at the midpoint of the program.

NPO and TA providers provide follow up and support with AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Forum and dedicated email address to collect questions/comment related to mid-point.

Mar 2012 / 3. Conclusion

Participate in webinar on conclusion and receive toolkit – including encouraging activities to share and spread work.
Follow up and support by NPO with Forum and dedicated email address to collect questions/comment related to conclusion.

In addition to these activities the NPO and TA providers will work with hospitals to collect success stories and promising practice interventions throughout and after the conclusion of the programs to support spread activities and sharing your learnings with others.

Talking About the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network

Key Messages and Talking Points About the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network

Below are some key messages and supportive talking points that emphasize the importance of theAF4QHospital Quality Network. These key messages should prove helpful when talking to others about the network including stakeholders, staff and media.

Aligning Forces for Quality Hospital Quality Network (AF4Q Hospital Quality Network) is a nationwide learning network of over 130 hospitals working together to improve the quality and safety of patient care.

Participating hospitals are a part of a virtual network of hospitals that develop and share quality improvement tools, strategies and lessons learned with each other.
The program engages health care providers at all levels of the organization to improve the quality and safety of patient care, identify potential disparities and develop a plan to ensure equity, and develop and encourage the spread of effective and replicable Quality Improvement (QI)strategies, models and resources within the organization and across Aligning Forces communities.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and staffed by experts at The George Washington University, the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network is an important part of the Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Qualityeffort to improve quality and reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health care.

The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network includes three separate quality improvement initiatives aimed at helping hospitals tackle key issues like racial and ethnic disparities, time spent in Emergency Departments (EDs) or readmissions of patients recently discharged with a diagnosis of heart failure.

The program allows hospitals in select communities to participate in one or more of three areas of quality improvement, including:
Reducing Readmissions
Increasing Throughput
Improving Language Services
Hospitals will collect and submit data on specific metrics on a monthly basis which will be examined by patient’s race, ethnicity and language (REL).
Hospitals will be trained on the standardized collection of self-reported race/ethnicity/language data.
Hospitals will participate in monthly quality forums such as webinars and conference calls. These forums, along with the Hospital Quality Network web site and list serve, will offer a peer-to-peer discussion of common issues, as well as concerns and successes.
Hospitals will submit quarterly progress reports which will be used to determine the need for additional education and identify opportunities for targeted technical assistance.

Key Messages and Talking Points About Reducing Readmissions

Readmission of patients recently discharged after hospitalization is an expensive and all too common lapse in the quality of care delivered in the U.S. health care system.

National data reveal that nearly 24.5% of Medicare patients admitted for chronic diseases such as heart failure (HF), pneumonia and gastrointestinal problems will return to the hospital within 30 days and that the government is estimated to be paying an extra $12 to $17 billion a year for this unnecessary care.
In addition, patients of differing races, ethnicities and language preferences often experience different rates of readmission.
There are thousands of reasons for readmissions – including issues such as lack of patient compliance with recommended follow-up, poor patient-provider communication, simple medical errors and hospital-acquired infections – but experts agree that they often result from poorly coordinated care and are often preventable.

The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Reducing Readmissions program helps hospitals and providers at all levels of the organization to improve heart failure care, reduce racial and ethnic disparities and ultimately reduce avoidable readmissions

Participating hospitals aim to reduce 30-day readmission rates following heart failure hospitalization by at least 20 percent from baseline by March 2012 and achieve and maintain at least 95 percent adherence (or compliance) on the heart failure Measure of Ideal Care (a measure determining whether heart failure patients received all recommended therapies).
Participants in Reducing Readmissions will be continuing in the footsteps of previous RWJF initiatives and pilot programs that involved a variety of both academic and community hospitals in the nation including Duke University Hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, Washington Hospital Center and many others.
Their experiences proved that the quality of cardiac care can be dramatically improved in a relatively short time frame. In one pilot program, the percentage of patients receiving all recommended care for heart failure, for example, improved 37 percent at participating hospitals over two years.
[INSERT HOSPITAL NAME] will participate and collaborate through a “learning network” structure to test new ideas, quantify results and share lessons learned. Program successes will be shared nationwide, giving other hospitals concrete and effective initiatives that they can adopt in their own busy hospital environments.
The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Reducing Readmissions program uses a tested, rigorous quality improvement measurement process to look at how [INSERT HOSPITAL NAME] and other hospitals track patients’ race, ethnicity and primary language, then identify how they can improve the care they provide to such patients.

Although the quality of health care is poor for many Americans, specific racial and ethnic groups continue to experience lower-quality health care when compared to white patients, and the opportunity to make a difference in cardiac care is particularly strong.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are measurable differences in the range of medical services that are provided to people in the U.S. based on their race or ethnicity.
The evidence on these disparities in treatment is strongest for African Americans and Hispanics in the United States, and is growing for American Indians.
In 2002, the nonpartisan and well-respected Institute of Medicine issued a groundbreaking report entitled Unequal Treatment, which provided evidence that racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to receive lower-quality care than whites, particularly when being treated for heart disease and cancer.
Numerous research studies released subsequent to Unequal Treatment indicate that, years later, little has been achieved in reducing these disparities.

African Americans and Hispanics are less likely than whites to receive cardiac therapies and procedures—even when patient characteristics, such as age, gender, income, health coverage status, co-morbidities and disease severity are similar.
There is particularly strong evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in cardiac care.
The recommended standard of care for cardiac patients is clear.
The measurement tools to determine whether heart disease patients are receiving the recommended standard of care have already been developed and tested.

Key Messages and Talking Points About Increasing Throughput

America’s hospital emergency departments (EDs) are at a breaking point – weighed down by overcrowding as patient volumes have steadily increased while at the same time, capacity has decreased.

A growing number of visits are becoming increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of EDs, which are taking on a heavier patient load.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, from 1996–2006, annual ED visits grew from 90.3 million to 119.2 million nationally.
Meanwhile, the number of hospitals operating EDs in the United States declined from more than 5,000 in 1991 to fewer than 4,000 in 2006.
In other words, the number of ED visits rose 32 percent, while the number of hospital EDs across the country dropped almost 20 percent.
In today’s uncertain health care and economic environment, our nation’s hospital EDs have become a critical primary and emergency care safety net for virtually all Americans.
As more become uninsured or unemployed and access to primary care becomes more difficult, the use of the ED for non-urgent care and preventable conditions is on the rise.
Yet despite perceptions, care provided to the uninsured and patients with non-urgent conditions is not a major driver of ED overcrowding.

-The bulk of ED volume and growth is being driven by non-elderly, privately insured middle-class patients.

With nearly 120 million patients visiting America’s emergency departments each year, millions may not be receiving safe and timely treatment.

Managing overcrowding is a problem for all hospitals across the United States that operate emergency departments, and it brings the potential for serious negative consequences for health care access, quality and patient safety.

Patients entering an overcrowded ED face longer wait times for care, with the consequence being that some leave the ED without being seen. It also disrupts ambulance service in the region.
Research has shown that increases in ED overcrowding are associated with increased waiting times for treatment of pain and infections, more adverse health care events and higher mortality rates.
The struggling state of America’s EDs also raises questions about our nation’s ability to respond to potential public health emergencies, such as natural disasters, epidemics and bioterrorism events.

ED overcrowding is not just an ED problem – it is a hospital-wide problem.

Although some hospitals require additional resources and capacity to deal with ED overcrowding, research shows that the most effective way to address it is to improve the efficiency of internal processes and patient flow throughout the hospital.
The most common and documented cause of ED overcrowding is the inability to move admitted patients from the ED to an inpatient bed.
Any effective effort to address ED overcrowding must involve a sustained commitment to improving workflow and efficiency throughout the entire hospital rather than the ED by itself.

The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Increasing Throughput program helps hospitals test real-world solutions to find, develop and measure the effectiveness of strategies to improve patient flow and reduce ED crowding.

Hospitals participating in AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Increasing Throughput engage health care providers at all levels of the organization to improve emergency department patient throughput time and reduce racial and ethnic disparities by building on the lessons learned from previous and other current RWJF-supported hospital networks, including Urgent Matters.
Participating hospitals aim to improve select emergency department performance measures by 15 percent from baseline by March 2012.
Hospitals participating in AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Increasing Throughput are following in the footsteps of pilot programs such as the Urgent Matters learning network’s I and II collaboratives which provided breakthrough research on patient flow measurement and improvement.

Key Messages and Talking Points About Improving Language Services

When patients and health care providers are not able to communicate clearly and thoroughly with each other, the quality of care suffers.

Research shows that when patients have difficulty communicating with their health care providers, they do not receive the best care possible, because they are far less likely to understand their conditions, or adhere to medication and disease management recommendations.
At the same time, these patients are unable to communicate important information to their health care providers, which can result in missed diagnoses, and even medical errors.
As a result, more hospitals like [INSERT HOSPITAL NAME] are recognizing that the quality of language services they provide is linked to the quality of medical care patients receive.

Just as any patient expects care from a qualified health care professional, a patient with limited English proficiency should expect that language services be provided by professionals who are specially trained in interpreting health and medical information.

Providing effective language services requires skills beyond just the ability to speak another language. Although there is no uniform standard, experts agree that language services are best provided by people who have been trained in these skills and whose abilities in this arena have been formally assessed.
Many health care professionals are themselves bilingual and bicultural and can relay information to patients in their own language, which sets the stage for an effective environment for communicating. Even bilingual providersshould be assessed for language proficiency. If they sometimes serve as an interpreter, they also should receive training before providing these services to patients.

The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Improving Language Services program helps hospitals to identify, test and assess strategies for providing timely, effective language services to patients with limited English proficiency.

The program focuses on how hospital staff can better structure and manage language services programs in order to have effective, efficient and timely communication with patients who speak little or no English.
The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Improving Language Services programhas four key goals:
Engage health care providers, language services providers and leaders at all levels of the health care organization to improve the delivery and availability of language services for persons with limited English proficiency (LEP).
Improve the safety of care for LEP patients.
Implement performance measurement in hospitals to improve language services.
Encourage the spread of successful strategies to increase language services capabilities within hospitals and across health systems.
Hospitals participating in Improving Language Services engage health care providers at all levels of the organization to improve the delivery and availability of language services and patient safety by building on the lessons learned from previous and other current RWJF-supported hospital networks, including Speaking Together and the AF4Q Language Quality Improvement Collaborative.
[INSERT HOSPITAL NAME]’s team will participate and collaborate through a virtual “learning network” structure to test new ideas, quantify results and share lessons learned. Program successes will be shared nationwide, giving other hospitals with linguistically diverse patient populations concrete and tested examples of effective language services programs and interventions that they can adopt in their own busy hospital environments.
The AF4Q Hospital Quality Network: Improving Language Services programuses a tested, rigorous quality improvement measurement process to look at how [INSERT HOSPITAL NAME] and other hospitals communicate with non-English-speaking patients—and how we can improve their services.

Key Messages and Talking Points About Aligning Forces for Quality