Goal: Reduce Falls

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates that 700,000 to 1 million hospitalized patients fall each year. More than one-third of in-hospital falls result in injury, including serious injuries such as fractures and head trauma.

Fall prevention has been the subject of intensive research and quality improvement efforts, which have helped define key elements of successful fall prevention programs.

Goal: Improve Patient Satisfaction

Athens-Limestone hospital strives to deliver excellence always in patient experience across the entire patient journey as a whole. To support this commitment, Athens-Limestone hospital has established a service excellence team. The service excellence team will facilitate efforts to measure and improve our patients’ and their families’ experience of care.

Patient experience encompasses the range of interactions that patients have with the health care system, including their care from health plans, and from doctors, nurses, and staff in hospitals, physician practices, and other health care facilities. As an integral component of health care quality, patient experience includes several aspects of health care delivery that patients value highly when they seek and receive care, such as getting timely appointments, easy access to information, and good communication with health care providers.

By looking at various aspects of patient experience, one can assess the extent to which patients are receiving care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values. Evaluating patient experience along with other components such as effectiveness and safety of care is essential to providing a complete picture of health care quality.

Goal:  Sepsis reduction team

Sepsis is the body’s overwhelming and life-threatening response to infection which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death. Learn more about the symptoms of sepsis, which kills 270,000 Americans each year. https://www.sepsis.org/

Goal: Population Health Initiative

Population health brings significant health concerns into focus and addresses ways that resources can be allocated to overcome the problems that drive poor health conditions in the population.  Population health provides “an opportunity for health care systems, agencies and organizations to work together in order to improve the health outcomes of the communities they serve. ( CDC)