American Hospital Association: New analysis shows hospitals improving performance on key patient safety measures surpassing pre-pandemic levels (September 2024)

Summary

 A new report from the American Hospital Association (AHA) using data analysed by Vizient finds that hospital performance on key patient safety and quality measures is better in the first quarter of 2024 than it was before the Covid-19 pandemic, and that hospitals made these improvements while caring for patients with more significant health care needs. In the years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals across the country achieved success in improving key markers that measure patient safety, including reducing infections, expediting the diagnosis and provision of life saving treatments for heart attack and stroke, and preventing unnecessary readmissions. Unsurprisingly, the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted that progress. However, new data analyses show not only a rebound but an improvement on pre-pandemic performance in patient safety.

Content

Key takeaways

• Despite being sicker and more complex, hospitalised patients in the first quarter of 2024 were on average over 20% more likely to survive than expected given the severity of their illnesses compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.
• Based on Vizient’s analysis, the AHA using national hospitalisation data projects that while caring for sicker patients, hospitals’ efforts to improve safety led to 200,000 Americans hospitalised between April 2023 and March 2024 surviving episodes of care they wouldn’t have in 2019.
• Hospitals cared for more patients overall in the first quarter of 2024 than in the last quarter of 2019, including providing care to a sicker, more complex patient population.
• Hospitals’ central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) in the first quarter of 2024 were at rates lower than those recorded in the fourth quarter of 2019.
• Not only did multiple key preventive health screenings rapidly rebound to pre-pandemic levels, but ongoing improvement has led to a 60%-to-80% increase in breast, colon and cervical cancer screenings in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the fourth quarter 2019.