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PHS Now Sharing Outcomes Data

For quite some time PHS has been tracking “outcomes” data to continually improve our services and the care and safety of our patients in the home. Safety has always been and remains to be a top priority in the services we provide on a daily basis to some of the countries most medically-fragile children. PHS tracks data and outcomes to continually improve the quality of care. Outcomes has become common buzzword in today’s health care arena. The obvious goal for measuring outcomes is to improve the quality and delivery of health care at a lower cost. And with recent health care reform outcomes could direct patient referral patterns as well as reimbursement.

Measuring outcomes helps PHS:

  • Establish benchmarks and standards of safe, in-home health care
  • Determine if appropriate care is being provided by all caregivers
  • Identify areas for improvement
  • Document interventions and treatments that are most effective
  • Evaluate effectiveness of education and training tools
  • Provide patients and other patient caregivers a method to evaluate the quality of PHS’s in-home health care

Like I said before, we have been measuring outcomes data for quite some time, and in the Fall 2011 issue of The Pulse, we reported outcomes on central line bloodstream infections (CLABSI) in homecare patients with central venous access serviced by PHS home infusion nurses. PHS reported infection rates significantly lower than hospital infection rates. What makes these low infection rates even more remarkable is the high acuity of these PHS patients.

Recently, we added a page devoted to patient outcomes on our updated PHS website. There, you will find information on the CLABSI results, as well as other outcomes related to respiratory therapy, private duty nursing and shipping accuracy.

On the respiratory side, we recently completed a 12-month observational study of our tracheostomy dependent patients. (You can read more about this study in a blog post here.) Tracheobronchitis is one of the most common medical conditions affecting pediatric patients with artificial airways and there’s a lot to be learned about it in the homecare setting. We are working to compile the results and look forward to sharing the results with you soon.

In the meantime, we encourage you to take a look at the new patient outcomes page on our website. Check back often, because we will continue to populate the page with additional statistics and studies as they become available.

Originally published: April 8, 2012

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