We Care About Your Care
Health is our most precious possession. When you entrust your care to us, we consider it our obligation to provide the highest quality care and to ensure your stay is comfortable.
Quality care means using advanced technology and procedures, respecting our patients as partners in their care, and making family members feel welcome and informed when visiting our hospitals.
Tobacco-Free in 2010
John C. Lincoln Health Network is in the process of developing a tobacco-free policy that will affect all of the network's facilities, its two hospitals, physician practices and community services. A task force of co-workers, made up of people who use tobacco and those who don’t, will develop a plan for a tobacco-free policy that is expected to go into effect at some point during 2010.
Quality Reporting on the Web
In recent years, federal and state government agencies and independent organizations have begun reporting information on their Web sites about the quality of health care and the cost of services at our nation’s hospitals. While information reported on these sites is usually 10 to 18 months old and does not necessarily reflect the care being provided today, it helps consumers compare hospitals.
Hospital quality measures reported on the Internet are usually of two types:
- Process measures show how well an organization is following certain evidence-based care practices that can lead to better patient results – for example, the percent of heart attack patients who receive aspirin upon arrival at the emergency department.
- Outcome measures demonstrate the actual results of care, such as the rate of complications following heart surgery.
In addition, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Web site recently started reporting performance ratings from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys. These ratings are based on patient evaluations of certain aspects of care they have received, such as nursing care, cleanliness of the room and how often doctors listened to them attentively.
Our Long Standing Commitment to Quality
John C. Lincoln Health Network has embraced transparency in reporting quality, patient satisfaction and pricing from the start. We have been voluntarily providing data to the CMS and other organizations.
But we do not stop there. Over the years, we have participated in the patient satisfaction surveys conducted by the firm of Press Ganey, a leader in health care quality measurement. We also evaluate our internal data monthly and work with our physicians and nurses to provide ongoing improvements to our systems, processes and protocols.
Having information from a variety of sources helps us understand better our patients’ experience so that we can continuously improve our performance.
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