This exercise allows you to examine how quality of hospital care is evaluated through data obtained from electronic health records. This exercise is discussed in several health administration courses, including courses on quality improvement, informatics, or statistics. In practice, the need to analyze these types of data arises in improvement teams, where managers, clinicians and sometimes patients work together to systematically improve healthcare processes.
Part 1: In this assignment, you are asked to examine if prophylactic antibiotics are discontinued within 24 hours after end of surgery. Instead of providing you with the data, we ask that you download the data on the web so that you learn more about the source of the data and peculiar organization of the data. Hospital Compare provides information on many quality indicators. In this assignment, you are asked to focus on failure to stop use of antibiotics post surgery. The Hospital Compare web site provides the following rationale for why this measure of quality is helpful: “A goal of prophylaxis with antibiotics is to provide benefit to the patient with as little risk as possible. It is important to maintain therapeutic serum and tissue levels throughout the operation. Intra-operative re-dosing may be needed for long operations. However, administration of antibiotics for more than a few hours after the incision is closed offers no additional benefit to the surgical patient. Prolonged administration does increase the risk of clostridium difficile infection and the development of antimicrobial resistant pathogens.” To complete this assignment complete the following tasks:
Download Hospital Compare data for the years starting from 2015 till now. Merge the file “HQI_HOSP_TimelyEffectiveCare” across all databases for different years.
Select measure ID “SCIP_INF_3”; this measure refers to prophylactic antibiotic use. Select to work with data from “Southeast Alabama Medical Center”; this is provider ID “010001”.
Calculate the rate of overuse of antibiotics. In these data, the field “Score” refers to the number of patients with overuse of antibiotics. The field “Sample” refers to all selected surgical patients with no evidence of prior infection. The ratio of Score to Sample provides the rate of overuse of antibiotics.
Construct a control chart showing rate of overuse of prophylactic antibiotics over time in Southeast Alabama Medical Center. Download the needed data using the following databases (if new data is available, please use them)
You can find the solution https://mymasonportal.gmu.edu/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_402454_1&content_id=_10631204_1&mode=reset#
Sample Solution