Mason Announces 2008 Health Care Quality Improvement Awards

April 25, 2008

The Department of Health Administration and Policy in the College of Health and Human Services announced four winners of its annual Improvement of the Year Award at a banquet on April 24.

This competitive award was created to recognize teams from mid-Atlantic health organizations that have significantly improved the quality of care in their hospitals or health care systems. This year, 21 projects were submitted.

This year’s Improvement of the Year award winners, projects and categories are:

• Inova Loudoun Hospital: Partnering with Patients to Prevent Falls — Health Systems Risk Reduction.
  This project aimed to prevent patient falls by evaluating the fall risk assessment process, developing interventions based on level of risk and building a safety culture among staff as well as patients. As a result, the fall injury rate was reduced from 18.8 percent in 2006 to 1.3 percent in 2007.
  
  
• Chesapeake Regional Medical Center: Avoiding Needless Deaths: End Tidal Co2 (Capnography) Monitoring for Patients Receiving patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) Narcotics — Health Systems Risk Reduction.
  This medical center aimed to identify technology that would be cost efficient for an independent community hospital and implement this new technology to save lives. A team identified six factors as to why there are more adverse effects related to PCA administration and determined that capnography was more effective than the previous method.
  
  
  
• MediCorp Health System: A Multidisciplinary Approach to a Patient Care Process in Transforming an Emergency Department Environment Using LEAN Concepts — Service Excellence.
  The health system aimed to reduce patient overcrowding in the emergency rooms. The goal was to reduce the amount of non-value-added patient processing, waiting and other forms of waste in the emergency department. Their efforts have led to decreased waiting times, length of stay and walkout rates.
  
  
  
• Inova Fairfax Hospital: The Campaign to Reduce Time to First Antibiotics in the NICU — Clinical Excellence.
  This project's goal was to administer first antibiotics within 60 minutes from the time of the order in 100 percent of the Fairfax Hospital for Children’s Intensive Care Nursery. The baseline success rate of ampicillin administration went from 54.7 percent to 95.7 percent in the third quarter of 2007, and the success rate of gentamicin/cefotaxime administration went from 31.3 percent to 92.3 percent.

The Improvement of the Year Award was originally launched in 2004 as a class project in the Process Improvement course taught by Farrokh Alemi, professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy. Today, under the auspices of the department, the awards publicly acknowledge improvement teams dedicated to making advancements in patient care safety and quality.

This year's judges were Alemi; Rick Christiansen, director of medical services for Information Manufacturing Corporation; Karen Drenkard, vice president for nursing, Inova Health System; Angela Koelsch, chief of the Core Laboratory for the Department of Pathology and Area Laboratory Services; Rebecca Leung, manager of IT Health for CGI Federal Inc.; P.J. Maddox, chair of the Department of Health Administration and Policy; and Martin Perlin, executive in residence, Department of Health Administration and Policy.

Award sponsors are David S. Goldberg, MS '06, and Claudia Goldberg; and Taylor-Oden Enterprises (Carolyn A. Taylor, BSN '78, MSN '86, MBA '94, and Leslie Taylor).

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