Health Quality Innovators (HQI) has announced winners of the second annual Health Quality Innovator of the Year Awards for Maryland. HQI is the Medicare Quality Innovation Network—Quality Improvement Organizations (QIN-QIO) for Maryland and Virginia and a Practice Transformation Network assisting practices in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
The awards represent HQI’s commitment to improving healthcare in communities across the region by recognizing organizations using evidence-based approaches to quality improvement that deliver better care, better population health, and lower costs.
Sinai Hospital, a valued PeraHealth partner, won in the “data-driven care” category. Founded in 1866, Sinai Hospital is a 504-bed nonprofit medical center affiliated with the Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore and focused on quality patient care, teaching and research.
The hospital wanted to find a way to use data to decrease the incidence of sepsis. Seeing gaps in the ability of current electronic medical records to enable early identification of sepsis, the executive leadership team investigated and selected the Rothman Index as a more accurate predictive analytics tool. The Rothman Index is a patient score generated by an algorithm that evaluates vital signs, general lab results and nursing assessments. It is unique in the emphasis placed on nursing assessments and its visual nature, allowing for healthcare providers, patients and families to “see” a patient’s status on a screen.
The care team implemented a pilot in the Intensive Care, Cardiac Intensive Care, Intermediate Care and Post-Anesthesia Care Units, and initiated a nurse training program. Early results show promise—Sinai’s sepsis mortality rate has decreased from 25.49% in January 2018 to 16% in June 2018.
The Rothman Index is the only algorithm proven to reduce mortality in practice.