Case Studies
Healing All Hearts
Improving quality of care can go hand in hand with eliminating disparities in care. University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson participated in Expecting Success: Excellence in Cardiac Care, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This initiative aimed to improve quality of cardiac care for African-American and Hispanic patients by improving care for all patients. UMMC adopted standardized protocols to collect race, ethnicity and language data. The medical center used the data to provide monthly reports on care performance measures, stratified by patient race, ethnicity and primary language. UMMC also tracked core measures of care for heart attack patients. In two years at UMMC, the number of patients receiving all core measures of care for heart attack increased from 74 percent to 82 percent. UMMC also set up an outpatient heart failure management clinic, led by a nurse practitioner who helps patients manage their disease after leaving the hospital. One year after opening the clinic, 0 percent of those patients had not had a readmission to the hospital. For more information, contact Mary Mixon, assistant administrator, hospital administration, at mmixon@umc.edu, or Patricia Freeman, clinical outcomes coordinator, at pfreeman@umc.edu.
Improving quality of care can go hand in hand with eliminating disparities in care. University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson participated in Expecting Success: Excellence in Cardiac Care, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This initiative aimed to improve quality of cardiac care for African-American and Hispanic patients by improving care for all patients. UMMC adopted standardized protocols to collect race, ethnicity and language data. The medical center used the data to provide monthly reports on care performance measures, stratified by patient race, ethnicity and primary language. UMMC also tracked core measures of care for heart attack patients. In two years at UMMC, the number of patients receiving all core measures of care for heart attack increased from 74 percent to 82 percent. UMMC also set up an outpatient heart failure management clinic, led by a nurse practitioner who helps patients manage their disease after leaving the hospital. One year after opening the clinic, 0 percent of those patients had not had a readmission to the hospital. For more information, contact Mary Mixon, assistant administrator, hospital administration, at mmixon@umc.edu, or Patricia Freeman, clinical outcomes coordinator, at pfreeman@umc.edu.