Valued Voice

In September 2024, the American Hospital Association (AHA) published a report powered by Vizient® showing that hospitals and health systems performed better on key patient safety and quality measures in early 2024 than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic. To explore the factors behind reduced mortality risk, AHA once again collaborated with Vizient and their Clinical Data Base, which receives data on over 14 million inpatients and 200 million outpatients annually.

Vizient analyzed performance across numerous patient safety indicators within a cohort of hospitalized surgical patients. These indicators, originally developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), are tracked across various quality and safety programs and include conditions that can significantly increase the risk of major complications or death.

Three indicators showed notable improvement during the same period that overall surgical mortality risk declined:

• Post-operative sepsis decreased by 9.2%
• Post-operative respiratory failure dropped by 19.0%
• Post-operative hemorrhage fell by 22.3%

These reductions represent a key factor contributing to improved survival rates among hospitalized surgical patients. Several Wisconsin hospitals are included in the Vizient data set. To view over 40 quality and patient safety measures for Wisconsin hospitals, visit WHA’s CheckPoint website, a voluntary hospital quality reporting program launched in 2004.

The AHA’s Patient Safety Initiative, launched in 2023, is a collaborative, data-driven effort to help hospitals and health systems reinforce and accelerate patient safety. The initiative provides tools and data to advance safety, offers a platform for sharing improvement stories and highlights innovations that support and sustain safety progress.

Hospitals and health systems remain committed to continually improving patient outcomes and advancing innovation in care for the patients and communities they serve.