Webinar Transcript
April 29, 2011
A conference call conducted on April 29, 2011, provided users with an overview of the development and use of the Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture. The following is a transcript of the conference call.
Select to access the slide presentations.
Speakers | Presentations | Questions and Answers
Speakers
- Joann Sorra, Westat Project Director for the
AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture (SOPS).
- John Hickner, Chairman of Family Medicine,
Cleveland Clinic.
- Lyle J. (L.J.) Fagnan, Associate Professor of
Family Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and Director of the
Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network (ORPRN).
- Naomi Dyer, Senior Study Director at Westat.
Return to Contents
Presentations
Joann Sorra: Good
afternoon and welcome to our webinar on using the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety
Culture. My name is Joann Sorra. I'm the
Westat Project Director for the AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture and I'll
be the moderator for today's webinar.
Currently, there are patient safety culture surveys for three
health care settings: hospitals, medical offices, and nursing homes. AHRQ released the Hospital Survey in 2004,
the Nursing Home Survey in 2008 and the Medical Office Survey in 2009. The completed surveys and toolkit materials
can be found on the AHRQ Web site. AHRQ
is currently funding the development of a patient safety culture survey for use
in retail pharmacies. Today's webinar
will focus on the Medical Office Survey, also referred to throughout today's
presentation as the Medical Office SOPS.
In addition to me as the moderator, we're really pleased
today to welcome three outstanding speakers.
Joining us from Cleveland, Ohio, is Dr. John Hickner, Chairman of
Family Medicine at Cleveland Clinic.
Joining us from Portland, Oregon, is Dr. L.J. Fagnan, Associate
Professor of Family Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University and
Director of the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network, ORPRN. And here in Rockville, Maryland, is Dr. Naomi
Dyer, Senior Study Director at Westat.
The agenda for the webinar is outlined on slide 4.
We'll start with Dr. John Hickner giving
an overview of the development of the Medical Office SOPS.
Then Dr. L.J. Fagnan will present
information about a large-scale data collection conducted with the Practice-Based
Research Networks or PBRNs, along with valuable lessons learned.
Next we'll hear from Dr. Naomi Dyer, who
will present preliminary comparative results on the survey.
She will also share results on how patient
safety culture perceptions differ between physicians and medical office staff
and by medical office characteristics.
Finally, I will share information about an upcoming
comparative database for the survey and then we will end with a brief question-and-answer
session. Now, on with our program.
Our first speaker will be Dr. John
Hickner, Chairman of Family Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, giving an
overview of the development of the Medical Office SOPS.
John Hickner: Good afternoon. This is John Hickner.
The objective of my presentation will be to describe for you the development of
the Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture and to discuss briefly the
pilot testing of the survey that we did here in the United States.
As background, recall that the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety
Culture was released in November of 2004.
Before long, people realized that there was great need to have a survey
for office practice as well and the same team at Westat began development then
of the Medical Office Survey, which was released in January of 2009.
We went through the same development steps as occurred for
the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture with a very scientific
approach. We first reviewed the
literature and existing surveys, conducting background interviews with medical
office physicians and staff. I wanted to interject that the term patient safety
was really quite foreign to many people that work in medical offices.
They tended to think of the fire extinguisher
and tripping on the sidewalk and, of course, we mean a lot more than that.
We then identified key areas of safety
culture in the medical office setting, developed the survey items, conducted
cognitive testing of those items, and obtained input from over two dozen
researchers and stakeholders so that we had the right content and formatting.
Finally, we pilot tested the survey, analyzed
the data, and then made final adjustments to the survey.
The goals of this survey are typical for safety culture
surveys. First of all, we hope to raise
staff awareness about patient safety by those who complete the survey because
one learns a great deal about patient safety as you complete the survey by the
nature of the questions. We also want,
of course, to assess the current state of patient safety culture in office
settings to provide a baseline for future measurement and use these surveys
then for internal patient safety quality improvement in primary care and other
office practices. We want to evaluate
the impact of patient safety and quality improvement initiatives using this as
one of the evaluation tools and naturally to track improvements in patient
safety culture over time.
The Hospital SOPS has the following 12 dimensions, which are
listed in front of you and I'm not going to read each one of those but I will
pause for a minute to have you look these over and when we move on to the next
slide, you'll notice that some of these dimensions are carried forward but some
new dimensions emerge for the medical office culture survey.
We're seeing now the first six dimensions of the Medical
Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture and first are dimensions that look
different from the Hospital Survey. You
see patient safety and quality issues listed under number one, which are more
specific to medical office practice.
Information exchange with other settings is always a difficulty in
outpatient practice and an opportunity for error and the need for safe
procedures. Office processes and
standardization, of course; work pressure and pace is a big issue in primary care
offices especially. Patient tracking and
followup, because patients are usually not in our offices, and staff training
issues.
These are the other six dimensions of the Medical Office
SOPS, which are quite similar to the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture although
the questions may be slightly different.
I'll pause briefly for you to read these.
We then tested the survey.
It was a large pilot test; hard to call a pilot when you have 182
medical offices, 4,174 doctors, other health care providers and staff respondents.
So it was a very big pilot and listed below
are some of the organizations that we worked with in doing the pilot testing.
These are some characteristics of the offices in which we
test the survey: 63 percent were single specialty, 37 percent multispecialty; and
you can read the breakdown of the various types of practices and size of office
practices. You can see that most of
these practices were a bit larger. Not
too many really small office practices; most of these were somewhat larger
office practices.
Sixty-nine percent of these practices had only one location
but some had several locations, obviously, and most were owned by a hospital or
health care system, which is fairly typical now in the United States.
Twenty-five percent, however, were owned by
physicians or other groups of physician providers; 14 percent were university
and academic. Use of electronic tools
refers to implementation, for the most part, of electronic health records and
this gives a breakdown of how many were fully implemented but as you can see
most of these practices did not have full electronic medical records.
The survey was administered to all the doctors and staff in
these offices and most used paper forms; only 29 percent Web.
The response rate was phenomenal; terrific
response rate. You can see those listed
as 70 and 78 percent versus 65 percent for Web.
The average responses per office, 23; average response rate, 74 percent.
So a great response rate.
These are the people who responded broken down in this pie
chart. You can see the job descriptions,
so we have a pretty good representation of not only the physicians and other
providers but also office and support staff, both clerical and clinical.
The data was analyzed, of course, mainly looking at the
psychometrics and dropping poor-performing test items. Then the survey was
completed and released in 2009, with a Spanish version to be released
soon. Note that the Cronbach alpha
reliability testing was very good, so basically that means that the dimensions
we defined really hang together well.
Joann Sorra: Thank you, John.
Now let's transition to Dr. L.J. Fagnan,
who will present information about a large-scale data collection conducted with
the Practice-Based Research Networks, or PBRNs, along with valuable lessons that
he learned.
Lyle J. (L.J.) Fagnan:
Thank you, Joann. This is L.J.
Fagnan in Portland, Oregon, and I'm going to build on what Dr. Hickner was
talking about with 182 pilot sites and we're going to look at this from the
perspective of the individual practices and how we used our Practice-Based
Research Networks to engage these practices, looking at perceptions of
processes by potential use.
We created a consortium of Practice-Based Research Networks
out of the 110 primary care Practice-Based Research Networks around the Nation.
ORPRN convened 11 networks to survey 311
primary care offices with the Medical Office SOPS.
We sent an invitation to the PBRN director
saying we want a mix of urban and rural clinics, specialty, health information
technology enabled, and ownership variation and we actually developed a Web site
for this study and that's still operational.
This is a list of the 11 networks around the country.
Most are State specific, some are regional,
and one is national but we've covered quite a bit of the United States with
these 311 practices.
The goal was to have each network recruit 25 or more
practices that Practice-Based Research Networks built on their own experience
and expertise in terms of recruiting practices.
What ORPRN did was provide a template for letters of invitation,
information sheets to offices, and importantly, information for the point of
contact at the office with duties that were quite specific.
At the sampling, we wanted to get a wide range of primary
care offices. We looked at single
specialty, athough predominantly these were family medicine practices. We also had
pediatrics and internal medicine. We had
some multispecialty, mostly single specialty.
We had a mix of small practices with two or three clinicians.
Large practices are defined as four
clinicians or more. We also looked at whether the practices were health
information technology enabled and there are five items here and we considered
them enabled if they had three of the five items that were listed there.
We tried to find out how this was working and how these
networks actually did engage in the practices.
Practices are pretty busy and we wanted to figure out what they did, so
the vast majority of networks actually traveled to the offices and delivered
the surveys.
They followed up with phone calls but face-to-face meetings were the main
method of connecting with these practices.
We asked the PBRN coordinators, not the practices, about
what works best for you to distribute
and collect the surveys in your office. By and large, there is no
substitute for face-to-face meetings with the point of contact in the
offices. Many of the networks did this
around the lunch hour. Food seems to be
a great convener and actually worked with the staff to complete it.
We got the majority of the staff in these
offices at that time and the point of contact then followed up afterward and
the PBRN followed up with the point of contact using E-mails and phone calls. But,
again, the emphasis here is showing up in person at the office.
We did a survey of the points of contact in these offices. This
was an AHRQ task order with a defined deadline, so we had to do this very
rapidly after we completed the study. These were the early response rates.
We were trying to look at what barriers were encountered
in completing this survey. What could we
do to improve survey administration and what did the offices think about the
value and potential uses of the survey? We
had variable response rates with this group of early responders and two-thirds
of the respondents were office managers.
Looking at the enthusiasm among clinicians and staff, there
was some degree of enthusiasm for two-thirds of the folks. We felt good about
this because practices are really busy. They have a lot going on and to get two-thirds
of the folks saying, "We're somewhat enthusiastic" or "very enthusiastic" about
this was very positive.
Some of the positive comments were, "I was hearing back that
they could not wait to get the results back from the survey." "The staff were
very enthusiastic when starting the survey, realizing it asks great questions
about job satisfaction."
On the other side of the scale, comments were that staff
were just really not responsive to filling out surveys.
They kind of wondered why they were being
surveyed and suspicious of what was going to be done about it.
The survey results needed to take into
account the fact that this is a snapshot.
You're just getting the feelings of the person
that day. If they're having a bad day,
it might reflect on the survey and then competing priorities play a role.
One practice reported, "Look, we're
implementing an EHR [electronic health record]. This is not good
timing for us and things are kind of stressful."
Do you feel the survey items addressed all areas of patient
safety? Most folks felt it was fairly
comprehensive. A couple of comments that
are worth noting is that the medication error questions were too nonspecific to
really provide some quality improvement activities.
They wanted more specifics on care coordination.
In the qualitative comments, a gap in this
survey was really around the areas of access.
Access to parking, lighting, access for handicap patients, and extended
hours for clinics. This came across in
some of the comments.
Westat created reports for each of these 311 offices and
these reports went to each PBRN for their group of offices, a 42-page report,
and the networks then decided how they were going to distribute these
reports. What we did is we took PDFs and
E-mailed them to the lead clinician and the point of contact at the office and
many of us said we're going to go visit or have visited the office with the
results.
So the practices—this is early on—had health
meetings; they were planning to do that.
Some, about a quarter, were just going to provide written reports
only. And some said, you know, we're not
going to do anything with it.
Again, this is from the point of contact perspective.
Has your office benefited from participating
in this survey? They said that obtaining
internal data in a safe environment was very beneficial and allowed for honest
answers. These are clinician comments
here. Interesting to note, areas of
concern from the staff perspective opened a dialogue on many issues.
One office staff point of contact says, "Doubt
that we'll discuss the report; the office manager and physician didn't seem
interested in exploring the report." Another
physician said, "You know, I have monthly staff meetings and I'm going to break
these down into sections and discuss them at each staff meeting."
What feedback have you heard from the medical offices in
response to the reports? They thought
that the results were interesting; one office manager felt like it was too
lengthy and complex. A comment—this is
from the PBRN perspective—"I got the feeling that most clinics didn't share the
results with their staff, even when the PBRN offered to try to be helpful."
There was some confusion around negatively
worded questions.
We asked for suggestions about using the report in the medical
office and they said we need to explain the results carefully, particularly
around the reverse coding items and double negatives.
Again, no substitute for going to the
practice and talking to the clinicians and staff.
The practices felt that the PBRN should
provide education and support; otherwise, many offices don't take the time to
review the results or share them.
This is my last slide here. I asked about any other comments
and here's what I wrote. It says, "The
project was much more fun than I anticipated." Using, again, what the PBRNs
heard from their practices. "The results
we reviewed with the clinics were well received by staff and administration."
"The range of responses I heard when
implementing this survey was great. Some
examples are, 'I'm so glad you asked. Nobody
ever asked the front desk for their opinion before.'
Another young woman came with her survey in
her sealed envelope tightly clutched to her chest.
She asked, 'Are you absolutely sure my
manager will never see my survey? They won't know it's me, right?'
I also heard, 'This is the dumbest thing I've
ever done.' That person was very
interested in the results once it became apparent that things weren't working
as well as she thought they were." Next, I turn it over to Naomi.
Joann Sorra: Thank you, L.J.
Now let's transition to Dr. Naomi Dyer,
who will present preliminary comparative results on the survey.
She will also share results on how patient
safety culture perceptions differ between physicians and medical office staff
and by medical office characteristics.
Naomi Dyer: Thank you, Joann.
This is Naomi and now that we've had a nice
background of the development and pilot of the survey as well as the PBRN
effort, I'm going to be focusing on two objectives.
First, I'm going to present some of the comparative results
from the combined pilot-PBRN database.
The full report can be found online at the link shown on your
screen. Second, I'm going to present
some results that examine the relationships between the Medical Office SOPS
scores with staff positions and medical office characteristics.
The combined pilot-PBRN database consists of 470 medical
offices with 10,567 respondents. The
overall response rate, which is simply the total number of staff responding
divided by the total number of staff asked to complete the survey, was 73
percent. The average response rate
across the 470 medical offices was 78 percent, with about 22 respondents per
medical office.
This figure shows 6 of the 12 patient safety composites
ordered from the highest percent positive to the lowest.
As you can see here, the top average percent
positive responses for teamwork was 82 percent, followed by patient care
tracking and followup at 77 percent and organizational learning and overall
perceptions of patient safety and quality at 74 percent.
Overall, the three lowest composites were work pressure and
pace, which only had 46 percent of positive responses, followed by information
exchange with other settings at 54 percent, and office processes and standardization
at 59 percent positive. So what we see
is some variability across the composites, ranging from an average of 46
percent positive to 82 percent positive.
The survey also had an item asking the respondents to
provide an overall rating on patient safety.
As can be seen here, an average of 64 percent of respondents rated their
medical office as either excellent or very good.
As noted, these are just a preview of the
results and the full results including breakouts by staff position can be found
on the AHRQ Web site.
Switching gears a little bit, we have this really large data
set and we wanted to explore the relationships between the patient safety
culture scores and staff positions and medical office characteristics.
To do this, we used the 12 patient safety composite scores,
but we also created an overall average composite score, which is simply the
average across the 12 composites or a summary kind of patient safety culture
score. We also created the average
rating on quality. One of the items on
the survey asked respondents to rate their medical offices on the extent to
which their office was patient centered, effective, timely, efficient, and
equitable and we took those items and averaged them across to create this
average rating on quality, and then we looked at the overall rating on patient
safety. All the measures were calculated
at the medical office level and we looked at the percent positive
response.
So we had five questions we wanted to explore.
Are there differences in patient safety
culture scores by staff position, by medical office characteristics such as
office size, ownership, specialty, and the degree of health information
technology implementation?
The first question was, are there differences by staff
position? We predicted that out of all
the staff positions, the physicians would be the most positive about patient
safety culture in their medical offices than the other staff.
There were seven staff positions listed on the survey and
the respondents mostly fell into the administrative or clerical, as you can see
here with 28 percent. These staff are
like the front desk, receptionist, medical records personnel.
This is followed by other clinical, and these
are technicians and therapists, then your physicians at about 20 percent of the
respondents, and then you see RNs [registered nurses], LVNs [licensed vocational nurses], LPNs [licensed practical nurses], management, physician's
assistants, etc., make up the rest of the sample.
To look at this, we calculated the average percent positive score
by staff position at the medical office level and conducted one-way analysis of
variance to see if there were differences across staff positions.
When we looked at all seven staff positions,
we found out that there were some staff positions that were really similar to
each other. Basically, we found that
management and physicians were very similar on all of these 15 measures that we
looked at and the other staff positions were also very similar.
Instead of trying to relay all of the
different relationships that existed, we collapsed it down into management and
physicians versus all other.
What we found was that management and physicians were more
positive than the other staff on 11 of the 15 measures.
We see an average difference of 9 percentage
points and it ranged from 4 percentage points to 19 percentage
points. As we go through these analyses,
what I'll show you is this table that presents the results for the three
summary scores: the average SOPS composite score, the average rating on
quality, and the overall rating on patient safety and then I'll highlight for
you any of the major differences. On
this table you see here, we see for the average composite score, management and
physicians were at 70 percent positive while all others were at 66 percent
positive, for a 4 percentage point difference.
For average rating on quality, we see an 11 percentage point
difference. And for overall rating on
patient safety, we see a 5 percentage point difference.
The largest difference we found where management and
physicians were more positive than all other staff was for communication
openness, which is on the left side of this figure, where management and
physicians were 79 percent positive while all other staff were only 60 percent
positive. We see a similar pattern for
staff training, where management and physicians were 82 percent versus all
other staff at only 68 percent positive, for a difference of 14 percentage
points. And for communication about
error, we see a 9 percentage point difference between the two staff
positions.
While they were more positive on 11 of the 15 measures, they
were less positive than all other staff on 3 of the 15 measures and we see
these three measures here. For information exchange with other settings, the
management and physicians were at 45 percent positive while all other staff
were at 58 percent positive, for a 13 percentage point difference.
For patient care tracking and followup, we
see a 12 percentage point difference.
Again, all other staff are more positive on this measure and the same
thing for patient safety and quality issues, for a 5 percentage point
difference. Now, with all of these
numbers, if you've done the math, I said that they were more positive on 11 and
less positive on 3 of the 15, so there's still one measure out there where they
weren't significantly different from each other, and that measure was office
processes and standardization.
Our second analysis question was, are there differences in
these scores by medical office size? Based on our experience with the Hospital Survey
on Patient Safety Culture, we found that smaller hospitals tended to have more
positive scores. Therefore, we predicted
that smaller medical offices would have more positive patient safety culture
scores here.
To examine this question, we looked at the correlations between
medical office size and percent positive patient safety culture scores, where
size is defined as the total number of providers and staff.We see the range
that went from 5, which is because you need at least 5 respondents to be
included in the database, to 100.
When categorizing these medical offices into small, medium,
and large, we see that over 50 percent fell into the medium office size, which
is between 11 and 30 providers and staff, with 31 percent being large offices
at 31 or more providers and staff. Nineteen percent were small medical offices.
We found that smaller medical offices did have slightly more
positive patient safety culture scores than the larger offices on all 15
measures. We see moderate correlations,
with the average correlation of .27, ranging from .14 to .41. Looking at the
table, what we see for row one, the average composite score, we see a
correlation of .34, which is moderate. What that translates to in percent
positive is, small offices on that measure were 74 percent positive while
medium offices were 67 percent positive and the large offices fell down to 62
percent positive. Our strongest relationship is actually on this table. It's
with average rating on quality and what we see is a .41 correlation, which
translates into the small offices being 77 percent positive and the large
offices only being 58 percent positive. That's a 19 percentage point difference.
Our third analysis looked at the differences in patient
safety culture scores by medical office ownership, where we predicted that
physician/provider-owned offices would be more positive than other ownership
types.
Looking at the database, we see that most of the medical
offices were hospital and health system-owned at 51 percent, followed by
provider and/or physician owned and university or medical school owned.
We found that physician/provider-owned offices were more
positive than hospital/health system-owned offices on 10 of the 15
measures. This table shows all three
different types of ownership. Let's walk
through it. For the providers and
physicians, we see that on all three measures, they are about 70 percent.
When you look at the university/academic owned,
and hospital/health systems, they're in the 60s and they're very similar to
each other. We actually found that university/ academic and hospital/health
systems were similar on almost every single measure that we looked at.
The largest difference that we found for the
provider/physician and hospital/health system owned was for work pressure and
pace, for an 11 percentage point difference, where again the provider/physicians
were higher than the hospital/health system owned.
This slide shows the differences between the physician/provider
and university/academic offices, where they were different and more positive on
7 of the 15 measures. The two largest
differences: Not surprisingly, we see work pressure and pace appear here again,
because you see providers and physicians are 54 percent positive and university/academic
and hospital/health system are both at 43 percent positive.
The next one, patient care tracking and
followup, is the only time we see any difference between the university/academic-owned
offices and hospital/health system. Not
only are there differences between the physician and provider owned at 81
percent but also the hospital/health system and university aresignificantly
different from each other.
Then we looked at specialty. The question was, is there a
difference in patient safety culture scores between single- and multispecialty
offices? We predicted that single-specialty
offices would be more positive than the multispecialty offices.
Looking at the database, we see that 58 percent of the
medical offices were single-specialty offices, but of the multispecialty
offices, most were multispecialty with primary care only.
To look at this analysis, we performed
partial correlation. We did a partial
correlation so that we could control for office size between specialty and
patient safety culture scores.
We found that single-specialty offices tended to have
slightly higher SOPS scores on 6 of the 15 measures.
Our average correlation was .13, which is
actually kind of on the low range, ranging from .10 to .18.
Looking at this table, we see for average
SOPS composite score, the correlation was .12. Translating that into average
percent positive, we see about a 4 percentage point difference, where single
specialty are higher at 68 percent and multispecialty are lower at 64 percent.
We see a similar small relationship with
average rating on quality, and when we get to overall rating on patient safety,
it's not significant.
For specialty, though, we looked at the largest difference
and that was for owner/managing partner and leadership support for patient
safety and we see a 6 percentage point difference, where,
again,
your single specialty is more positive on this than your multispecialty.
Our final analysis was to see if there was a relationship
between health information technology (Health IT) implementation and SOPS scores and
we predicted that offices with greater Health IT implementation would have more
positive patient safety culture scores than those with less Health IT implementation.
Again, we performed partial correlations so that we could
control for office size between Health IT implementation and the Medical Office SOPS
scores, where we assess degree of Health IT implementation as 1 equals not implemented
and no plans to in the next 12 months all the way to 4, at fully
implemented.
There were five Health IT tools that we looked at.
Electronic appointment scheduling there on
the first row, 81 percent of the medical offices were fully implemented on this
tool while only 36 percent of the medical offices were fully implemented on
electronic ordering of tests, imaging, and procedures.
And then going down to the last row, we see 50
percent were fully implemented on electronic medical records.
What we found actually was that there weren't a lot of
relationships with these five tools except for implementation of electronic
medical records. So this is showing the
relationship for electronic medical record implementation, where they were
slightly higher on 11 of the 15 measures.
Again, we see a low to moderate average correlation of .15, ranging from
.10 to .27. Translating that into percent positive, we look at the average SOPS
composite score. We see fully
implemented offices were at 67 percent positive and not fully implemented were
just at 66 percent positive. So, not a
huge difference there when we dichotomize those fully implemented and not fully
implemented. And we see average rating
on quality was not significant and overall rating on patient safety had about a
3 percentage point difference between the fully implemented and not fully
implemented.
Again, looking at the strongest relationship of the largest
difference, we note patient safety and quality issues, where the fully
implemented offices were at 63 percent positive and the not fully implemented
were slightly lower, 5 percentage points lower, at 58 percent positive.
That was a lot to go over.
For our conclusions, I'm just going to talk about these five analyses we
discussed and let's recap. For staff
position, we saw that overall, management and physicians had more positive
patient safety culture scores than other staff except on those three where they
were less positive. Smaller medical
offices had slightly more positive patient safety culture scores than larger
ones. Physician/provider-owned offices
had more positive patient safety culture scores than hospital/health system-owned
and university/academic offices.
For specialty, we found that single-specialty medical
offices were slightly more positive than the multispecialty offices.
And for Health IT implementation, overall, it was
not strongly related to patient safety culture scores, so offices with greater
EMR [electronic medical record] implementation had slightly higher patient safety culture scores.
If you have any questions, these are the two E-mail
addresses you can write to, databases on safety culture and safety culture
surveys, and we'd be happy to answer them.
Thank you very much. And back to
you, Joann.
Joann Sorra: Thanks, Naomi.
There's just one more slide before we go to
the question-and-answer session and this is about the upcoming comparative
database for Medical Office Survey. As
many hospitals and health systems know, the Hospital Survey has had a
comparative database and an annual report has been produced since 2007 and we
will be establishing a comparative database on this survey.
The database will serve as a central
repository for any medical office or system that has administered the survey
and is willing to voluntarily submit their data.
And this will really be a great resource for
comparing results with other medical offices.
Right now, we've simply presented comparative results on 470
medical offices, but once we receive data from the larger Nation in terms of those
that have administered the survey, we will hope to expect to see a much larger
database. The participating medical
offices will receive a free medical office survey feedback report that will
compare their results to the latest benchmark.
An overall comparative report similar to the hospital report will be
produced and available on the AHRQ Web site in 2012.
The data submission will be open September 15th through
October 15th. I encourage all of
those hospitals, health systems, medical offices that are interested in
administering this survey to do so before September and then submit the data
and that way we can have a more robust database and better benchmarks.
For more information, the AHRQ Web site does
now have submission instructions and you can go to the site to see just what
you need to do to submit to that database.
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