Quality & Patient Safety

OUR COMMITMENT TO QUALITY

We believe quality care is foundational to our Mission as a Catholic health care ministry: to provide comprehensive and compassionate care that improves the health of the people we serve. Guided by this Mission, our organizational values and evidence-based leadership practices, we have built a culture of high reliability and continuous improvement. With our Vision to lead the communities we serve to be among the healthiest in the nation, our teams work tirelessly to reduce harm, improve outcomes, and elevate patient experience—because your health deserves nothing less than excellence, and you deserve peace of mind.

St. Elizabeth Healthcare is committed to being a high reliability organization that focuses on what is valuable to our patients and their families. To achieve this, we are focused on continuous process improvement throughout the healthcare system to accelerate the cultural transformation of improving healthcare delivery through transparently monitoring performance metrics, promoting lean thinking, providing leadership development, and conducting process improvement initiatives.

Strategic Quality Goals

• Delivering the highest quality care in the region.
• Being a leader in patient experience.
• Achieving 5-star status from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS).
• Achieving top 25th percentile performance in readmissions and mortality as part of the CMS 5-star program.
• Reducing harm events with an ultimate goal of zero preventable harm.
• Lowering readmissions and hospital-acquired infections.
• Excelling in sepsis bundle compliance.
• Advancing specialty care in women’s health, oncology, heart and vascular care, surgery and age-friendly initiatives.

Impact Goals

As outlined by the Institute of Medicine, St. Elizabeth’s goals are to improve quality and safety through the pursuit of the following aims:

• Safe: Avoiding injuries to patients from the care that is intended to help them.
• Timely: Reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.
• Effective: Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit.
• Efficient: Avoiding waste of equipment, supplies, ideas and energy.
• Equitable: Providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status.
• Patient-centered: Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.

KEY QUALITY INDICATORS

We measure what matters most:

• Keeping Patients Safe: We have made our hospitals safer by reducing harmful events by nearly one-third since 2021. This means fewer patients are hurt or experience problems during their stay.
• Patient Experience: Every patient has the opportunity to share feedback after a care visit. These insights help us improve quality, safety and communication. By listening, we deliver care that is patient-centered, compassionate and responsive to individual needs and values.
• Fewer Return Visits: Fewer patients need to come back to the hospital after going home. We’ve made big improvements in this area, and we keep working to make sure our patients stay healthy and safe after they leave.

To achieve these goals, all St. Elizabeth associates participate in systematic quality improvement efforts, which focus on patient care delivery and support processes that promote optimal patient outcomes.

These goals are aligned with our strategic planning processes, annually with our system’s profit-sharing program, and are deeply integrated into our organization’s Journey to Excellence. The leadership development program aimed at becoming a more and more Highly Reliable Organization.