Quality & Patient Safety

St. Francis Medical Center strives to provide the safest and highest quality care to our patients, their families, and our community in a manner consistent with our Vincentian Values:  Compassion, Respect, Simplicity, Advocacy and Inventiveness to Infinity.  Our care plans and processes are built on evidence-based practices, and we hold ourselves to the highest standards.

We seek to provide care that is safe, patient centered, effective, timely, efficient, and equitable.  We measure our performance through a number of clinical process and outcome indicators and benchmark our performance against top performing medical centers within California and across the nation.

Dedicated to achieving excellent quality outcomes and to building a culture of patient safety, St. Francis Medical Center voluntarily participated in the CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration for the past six years, until the project’s completion in September 2009.  This past year, St. Francis Medical Center received eight attainment and performance awards for quality.  In addition, the hospital was a founding member of Premier’s QUEST program in 2007, a new health care performance model which focuses on quality, efficiency, and safety, with transparency.

Our Core Measures (key clinical indicators) address important clinical conditions:

• Heart Attack (Acute myocardial infarction)
• Heart Failure
• Community Acquired Pneumonia
• Children’s Asthma Care

We are committed to keeping our patients safe and protecting them from harm. We were a participant in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 5 Million Lives Campaign and have continued our work to prevent hospital acquired conditions. We have adopted the Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals and have implemented practices throughout the medical center and clinics to support patient safety.

Transparency

We report our clinical care and patient experience performance data publicly through several venues:  the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), the Joint Commission and the California Hospital Compare.

CMS Nursing Home Compare
www.medicare.gov/nhcompare/

CMS Hospital Compare
www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/

California Hospital Compare (CHART)
www.calhospitalcompare.org/

Quality Check – The Joint Commission
http://www.qualitycheck.org/consumer/searchQCR.aspx