How do you know which hospital is best for your child?
Dr. Barry Gilmore, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, discusses the importance of hospital outcomes in selecting care for your child.
Is This Hospital Best For My Child?: Why Hospital Outcomes Matter
Featured Speaker:
Learn more about Barry Gilmore, MD
Barry Gilmore, MD, MBA, FAAP
Barry Gilmore, MD is the Chief Medical Officer, Le Bonheur Children's Hospital.Learn more about Barry Gilmore, MD
Transcription:
Is This Hospital Best For My Child?: Why Hospital Outcomes Matter
Bill Klaproth (Host): Not all hospitals are created equal. But how is a parent supposed to know which hospitals deliver the results they promise? How do you determine the caliber of the hospital you are considering for your child’s treatment? Where do you even look for this information? Let’s get you some answers. We’re going to talk with Dr. Barry Gilmore, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital about hospital outcomes and why they matter. This is the Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. I’m Bill Klaproth. Dr. Gilmore, thanks for your time. Let’s start with this, can you give us a simple definition of what hospital outcomes are and why are they important?
Dr. Barry Gilmore (Guest): Sure, well you know for example, the World Health Organization gives us a good definition about outcome measure and that’s a change in the health of a person or a group of people or even a population that can be attributed to an intervention. So you might think about things like death rates, readmission to a hospital, or patient experience as some of those outcomes, and these are the kind of quality and cost targets that healthcare organizations are always trying to improve.
Host: Gotcha, so what are the ways parents then can find hospital outcomes, and how do they make sure they are accurate and true?
Dr. Gilmore: Well all hospitals should be providing some level of outcomes. They are usually located on the organization’s websites. The amount and level of detail might vary a bit from one organization to the next and you know really determining the accuracy of this information can sometimes really be challenging for parents, so we like to recommend that they compare the stated results on a website with some of the recognized consumer oriented organizations like we mentioned, US News and World Report, Leap Frog, Children’s Hospital Association. We really want folks to be cautious with any organization that’s not publicly reporting their outcomes.
Host: Right, so let me ask you this. What safeguards does Le Bonheur have in place to prevent a situation like we’ve seen in the news lately where outcomes are poor and not public?
Dr. Gilmore: Well that’s a great question with that, so some of the things that we have done is we really believe that transparency and information for our families and our community is critical for outcomes for all of our children. So we participate in a number of national and specialty specific organizations that we benchmark against and that publish their data and that we in turn publish that data on our websites. We also share this in open meetings with our providers, our associates, and our family partners, and finally we also place this information on our website. So if you went to our website today you would see that we published a quality report for 2018 that’s over 50 pages long that reports all of our quality measures on all of our service lines.
Host: So it’s good to know people coming to the Le Bonheur website will have no problem finding those outcomes, and when it comes to looking for those outcomes, what are the important ones parents should look for?
Dr. Gilmore: Well the things that are really critical we believe are to know about hospital acquired infections, so how likely is it that you may get an infection while you are in a hospital or a complication from a procedure or surgery, certainly patient and parent or family satisfaction with the experience at the hospital, and then those surgical and treatment outcomes.
Host: Would those be the big three then that we should look for?
Dr. Gilmore: It would and a lot of times when families are looking for things, they’re looking for very specific things that their child might have or might be facing, so whether it’s your child getting tonsils and adenoids removed or very critical things like what’s the best place for my child to get a heart transplant. Those are where you kind of want to look at those rankings nationally and then go to some of the websites and look at their outcomes.
Host: Okay, really interesting. So let me ask you this, how do Le Bonheur’s outcomes compare regionally and nationally?
Dr. Gilmore: Oh we’re always happy to share with those. Since 2010, Le Bonheur has been part of an organization that reports to the US News and World Health rankings. So we’re a number of children’s hospitals. We all submit data on how we’re doing on a whole variety of areas and different types of services. So Le Bonheur has been ranked in multiple specialties over the years, and for example in the last two years, over 8 of our sub specialties have been ranked highly with that in both 2018 and 2019 and our heart institute in particular has been ranked as number 10 in the United States. We also have several other parts of our service lines like orthopedics, neuroscience, urology that are listed on the top 20 in the United States.
Host: Well congrats on those outcome numbers. So can you share some specific outcome examples from your programs?
Dr. Gilmore: So some of the things that we look at and that we submit is, remember we talked about some of these outcomes earlier on was how are children doing when they are in these different programs, whether it’s surgery for orthopedics with that or neurosurgery, or how have our children that have had heart transplants done with that? How have their satisfaction, their family’s satisfactions been with us? How do we do on using laboratory data or certain types of x-rays or radiologic stories? So the way we maintain and manage children and how we serve their families.
Host: So you’re asking a lot of questions, which is good. So how are Le Bonheur’s outcomes ultimately calculated?
Dr. Gilmore: So there are a variety of ways that they are. So Le Bonheur participates in over 30 different national registries, databases, and organizations that are dedicated to healthcare safety and improved outcomes. For example, we participate in part of solutions for patient safety. Now that’s an organization of 135 children’s hospitals all across the country, and what we do is we put aside any competition in order to share what we know and learn together. So we place our data in repository so that they can all be examined and they can all be compared against each other with that, and then there are a number of other outcomes that we report and share. For example, we do that for the CDC, it provides us with information and feedback with that. We do that with government agencies and we also do it with these individual databases and registries that we participate in, and then we have some of our own internal measures that we like to report to our families and to our associates.
Host: So Dr. Gilmore, how do you think a hospital can be more transparent about their outcomes?
Dr. Gilmore: We really think that just by being open and honest about the processes that we have, the outcomes, and then sharing these with families and the community – you know care is not done in secret in the dark, but by openly sharing outcomes and children’s hospitals and organizations that can work together with families can really improve care and outcome for all children everywhere.
Host: So if all children’s hospitals would rise to this level of transparency, wouldn’t that raise the level of healthcare for all children? Is that right?
Dr. Gilmore: That’s absolutely right, and you know that really is kind of the basis behind the solutions for patient safety organization of the 135 hospitals we talked about, all those children’s hospitals saying we want to be better regardless of competition with that, so that we’re going to work on very critical things like hospital acquired infections, best outcomes for certain kinds of procedures and we’ll do that by openly sharing our information with each other.
Host: Dr. Gilmore thank you for your time. This has really been fascinating, and to learn more, please visit lebonheur.org and be sure to subscribe to the Peds Pod in Apple podcasts, Google Play, or where ever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out lebonheur.org/podcasts to view our full podcast library, and if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels. This is the Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. I’m Bill Klaproth, thanks for listening.
Is This Hospital Best For My Child?: Why Hospital Outcomes Matter
Bill Klaproth (Host): Not all hospitals are created equal. But how is a parent supposed to know which hospitals deliver the results they promise? How do you determine the caliber of the hospital you are considering for your child’s treatment? Where do you even look for this information? Let’s get you some answers. We’re going to talk with Dr. Barry Gilmore, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital about hospital outcomes and why they matter. This is the Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. I’m Bill Klaproth. Dr. Gilmore, thanks for your time. Let’s start with this, can you give us a simple definition of what hospital outcomes are and why are they important?
Dr. Barry Gilmore (Guest): Sure, well you know for example, the World Health Organization gives us a good definition about outcome measure and that’s a change in the health of a person or a group of people or even a population that can be attributed to an intervention. So you might think about things like death rates, readmission to a hospital, or patient experience as some of those outcomes, and these are the kind of quality and cost targets that healthcare organizations are always trying to improve.
Host: Gotcha, so what are the ways parents then can find hospital outcomes, and how do they make sure they are accurate and true?
Dr. Gilmore: Well all hospitals should be providing some level of outcomes. They are usually located on the organization’s websites. The amount and level of detail might vary a bit from one organization to the next and you know really determining the accuracy of this information can sometimes really be challenging for parents, so we like to recommend that they compare the stated results on a website with some of the recognized consumer oriented organizations like we mentioned, US News and World Report, Leap Frog, Children’s Hospital Association. We really want folks to be cautious with any organization that’s not publicly reporting their outcomes.
Host: Right, so let me ask you this. What safeguards does Le Bonheur have in place to prevent a situation like we’ve seen in the news lately where outcomes are poor and not public?
Dr. Gilmore: Well that’s a great question with that, so some of the things that we have done is we really believe that transparency and information for our families and our community is critical for outcomes for all of our children. So we participate in a number of national and specialty specific organizations that we benchmark against and that publish their data and that we in turn publish that data on our websites. We also share this in open meetings with our providers, our associates, and our family partners, and finally we also place this information on our website. So if you went to our website today you would see that we published a quality report for 2018 that’s over 50 pages long that reports all of our quality measures on all of our service lines.
Host: So it’s good to know people coming to the Le Bonheur website will have no problem finding those outcomes, and when it comes to looking for those outcomes, what are the important ones parents should look for?
Dr. Gilmore: Well the things that are really critical we believe are to know about hospital acquired infections, so how likely is it that you may get an infection while you are in a hospital or a complication from a procedure or surgery, certainly patient and parent or family satisfaction with the experience at the hospital, and then those surgical and treatment outcomes.
Host: Would those be the big three then that we should look for?
Dr. Gilmore: It would and a lot of times when families are looking for things, they’re looking for very specific things that their child might have or might be facing, so whether it’s your child getting tonsils and adenoids removed or very critical things like what’s the best place for my child to get a heart transplant. Those are where you kind of want to look at those rankings nationally and then go to some of the websites and look at their outcomes.
Host: Okay, really interesting. So let me ask you this, how do Le Bonheur’s outcomes compare regionally and nationally?
Dr. Gilmore: Oh we’re always happy to share with those. Since 2010, Le Bonheur has been part of an organization that reports to the US News and World Health rankings. So we’re a number of children’s hospitals. We all submit data on how we’re doing on a whole variety of areas and different types of services. So Le Bonheur has been ranked in multiple specialties over the years, and for example in the last two years, over 8 of our sub specialties have been ranked highly with that in both 2018 and 2019 and our heart institute in particular has been ranked as number 10 in the United States. We also have several other parts of our service lines like orthopedics, neuroscience, urology that are listed on the top 20 in the United States.
Host: Well congrats on those outcome numbers. So can you share some specific outcome examples from your programs?
Dr. Gilmore: So some of the things that we look at and that we submit is, remember we talked about some of these outcomes earlier on was how are children doing when they are in these different programs, whether it’s surgery for orthopedics with that or neurosurgery, or how have our children that have had heart transplants done with that? How have their satisfaction, their family’s satisfactions been with us? How do we do on using laboratory data or certain types of x-rays or radiologic stories? So the way we maintain and manage children and how we serve their families.
Host: So you’re asking a lot of questions, which is good. So how are Le Bonheur’s outcomes ultimately calculated?
Dr. Gilmore: So there are a variety of ways that they are. So Le Bonheur participates in over 30 different national registries, databases, and organizations that are dedicated to healthcare safety and improved outcomes. For example, we participate in part of solutions for patient safety. Now that’s an organization of 135 children’s hospitals all across the country, and what we do is we put aside any competition in order to share what we know and learn together. So we place our data in repository so that they can all be examined and they can all be compared against each other with that, and then there are a number of other outcomes that we report and share. For example, we do that for the CDC, it provides us with information and feedback with that. We do that with government agencies and we also do it with these individual databases and registries that we participate in, and then we have some of our own internal measures that we like to report to our families and to our associates.
Host: So Dr. Gilmore, how do you think a hospital can be more transparent about their outcomes?
Dr. Gilmore: We really think that just by being open and honest about the processes that we have, the outcomes, and then sharing these with families and the community – you know care is not done in secret in the dark, but by openly sharing outcomes and children’s hospitals and organizations that can work together with families can really improve care and outcome for all children everywhere.
Host: So if all children’s hospitals would rise to this level of transparency, wouldn’t that raise the level of healthcare for all children? Is that right?
Dr. Gilmore: That’s absolutely right, and you know that really is kind of the basis behind the solutions for patient safety organization of the 135 hospitals we talked about, all those children’s hospitals saying we want to be better regardless of competition with that, so that we’re going to work on very critical things like hospital acquired infections, best outcomes for certain kinds of procedures and we’ll do that by openly sharing our information with each other.
Host: Dr. Gilmore thank you for your time. This has really been fascinating, and to learn more, please visit lebonheur.org and be sure to subscribe to the Peds Pod in Apple podcasts, Google Play, or where ever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out lebonheur.org/podcasts to view our full podcast library, and if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels. This is the Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. I’m Bill Klaproth, thanks for listening.