UK HealthCare Website Now Includes Quality and Safety Information

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 25, 2013) –  UK HealthCare has added a new section on its website to share clinical outcome data.  Quality and Safety information can now be found at ukhealthcare.uky.edu/quality/home/ and includes measures on performance in key components of quality such as patient survival, quality of care, patient safety, efficient care and patient centeredness. 

"We are working to foster a culture of transparency," said Dr. Bernard Boulanger, chief medical officer at UK HealthCare. "As part of this goal, we want to share our outcomes – internally and externally – to aid us in continual improvement as we strive to provide the highest quality and safest care to each of our patients."

Information found on the website includes regularly updated and externally reported quality metrics and improvement efforts related to those metrics. It includes data required to be reported to government agencies available also on their websites, but it also includes some of the most recent data more current than will be found on other reporting sites.

Included on the site is survival rates, which compares the survival rates for seriously ill patients at UK HealthCare to the average national rate. Another area of comparison is quality of care, which looks at UK's performance as well as that of similar hospital systems nationwide. Quality of care measures included are readmissions within 30 days of a previous hospital stay as well as metrics related to the care of patients who have had heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia and surgery.

Other information that can be found on the website includes:

• Patient safety data that tracks infections and complications that can occur during a hospital stay.
• Efficiency data that tracks spending per patient with Medicare.
• Patient Performance where patient satisfaction is measured.

"We believe our patients have the right to understand the quality of care we provide, what we are doing well and where we are working to improve," said Dr. Michael Karpf, UK executive vice president for health affairs. "As a patient-centered health care enterprise, continually reviewing and discussing this data helps us focus in providing the very best care to every patient, every time."

For more information or comments, contact information is available at http://www.ukhealthcare.uky.edu/contact/.

Media Contact: Kristi Lopez, kristi.lopez@uky.edu or (859) 323-6363