Chester County Hospital partners with a number of organizations to promote excellence in health care and patient safety.
Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4)
The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council is an independent state agency that collects data from hospitals to determine the quality and value of the services they provide. Chester County Hospital data consistently compares favorably in all aspects examined.
Pennsylvania Department of Health
Chester County Hospital is licensed by the Pennsylvania Department of Health's Division of Acute and Ambulatory Care. A licensure survey is conducted every two years at all hospitals licensed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The surveyors focus on our hospital's compliance with regulations that address environmental, quality and safety practices.
The Joint Commission
Chester County Hospital is accredited by the Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization, which is the nation's premier standards setting and accrediting body in health care. The Joint Commission conducts periodic unannounced surveys at health care organizations to determine if they comply with its rigorous patient quality and safety standards.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)
IHI is a not-for-profit organization leading efforts to improve the safety and quality of health care throughout the world. Chester County Hospital is a participant in IHI's 100,000 Lives Campaign, a national effort to reduce preventable deaths in US hospitals through the implementation of six interventions that have been proven to save lives.
The National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ)
The National Association for Healthcare Quality is the nation's leading organization for health care quality professionals. NAHQ currently has more than 5,000 individual members and 100 institutional members. Its goal is to promote the continuous improvement of quality in health care by providing educational and development opportunities for professionals at all management levels and within all health care settings.
Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA)
The Hospital Quality Alliance is an alliance of various private sector, government consumer-oriented groups and organizations that promote health care quality. It has created commonly agreed upon measures that provide a broad picture of hospital quality that are voluntarily reported by participating hospitals. Chester County Hospital is a proud participant, and quality data is published quarterly on the Hospital Compare Website. In the majority of the data related to the measures of care submitted to Medicare, Chester County Hospital scores above the state and national average for heart attack care, heart failure care, pneumonia care and care for the patient undergoing surgery.
Hospital Consumer Assessments of Health Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)®
The HCAHPS initiative is a standardized national survey developed by CMS for measuring patients' perspectives on hospital care about critical aspects of their inpatient experience. HCAHPS surveys are distributed randomly to a sample of patients throughout the year; therefore, every Chester County Hospital patient interaction could contribute to the HCAHPS results. There is a national requirement for all hospitals who receive Medicare reimbursement to participate in this high profile patient satisfaction survey.
The survey produces data on the patients' ratings of how often a number of key behaviors and situations occur which are judged as central to a patient's experience of service excellence. Public reporting of the survey results is designed to create incentives for hospitals to improve their quality of care given that hospitals can be compared to each other on this public website.
March 2008 began the public reporting of HCAHPS results on the Hospital Compare Website where top scores of hospitals are displayed. Chester County Hospital has garnered recognition by virtue of the fact that we have performed consistently at higher scores than the Pennsylvania and regional hospitals'averages with which we are compared.
Press Ganey Associates
Chester County Hospital is committed to ensuring that our patients receive the highest quality of health care in a safe, supportive environment. In order to measure fully our patients' level of satisfaction, we employ Press Ganey Associates (as well as participating in the HCAHPS initiative).This nationally known vendor surveys random samples of our inpatients, cardiology and radiology outpatients, Ambulatory Care Center patients, and Emergency Department patients. The Press Ganey surveys emphasize perception of behavior and hospital experiences, in contrast to the focus of the HCAHPS questions. We routinely (i.e. quarterly) analyze the results of both surveys in detail with all relevant clinical and medical staff, and as well at the Departmental level in order to identify opportunities for improving upon our approach to service excellence.
Other Organizations: