As 2024 approaches, we will continue working to improve healthcare quality and patient safety. To better understand the biggest challenges and opportunities facing healthcare systems, we surveyed a small group of symplr customers about their quality priorities for 2024. The results revealed four major themes:
Quality improvement requires insights on performance and safety to inform your hospital or health system’s ongoing plan. Data and reporting on changes in quality and the accessibility of this information remains a priority. The survey highlighted the following areas with room for improvement:
Increasing your number of full-time employees is not likely happening anytime soon, so the pressure to streamline work will be a continuing priority heading into 2024. Survey respondents identified broad themes that most quality departments will identify with, and specific initiatives that may only apply to a subset of health systems. Priorities to streamline workflows include:
Health systems are striving to improve the patient experience. Two broad categories of quality improvement include readmission reduction and healthcare-associated infections (HAI) reduction. Sources of HAI that were mentioned include CLABSI, CAUTI, C. diff, MRSA, colon SSI, and hysterectomy SSI. Beyond these broad categories, the survey identified several specific outcomes needing improvement:
In addition to these specific outcomes, health systems seek to improve their public ratings, including the CMS Star Rating and Leapfrog Safety Grade.
To ensure all Americans have access to quality care, health systems are moving to measure and report on outcomes across communities and patient populations. 2024 quality priorities for health equity and social drivers of health (SDOH) aim to identify, measure, and eliminate disparities in healthcare to improve patient outcomes for relevant patient groups. Priorities include:
If your organization shares any of these priorities, symplr can help support your quality improvement goals with analytics and benchmarking, customized quality reporting, and simplified workflows.