Quality, Patient Safety and Clinical Excellence

Gulf Coast Medical Center is passionately committed to providing the highest quality care to the patients we serve. To that end, we focus intensive efforts on continuously monitoring many quality indicators in every clinical department of the hospital - we believe that if we can't measure it, we'll have a difficult time improving it. And we are committed to the open reporting of quality and safety in our hospital, which makes us even more accountable to our patients.

View the following national quality data to see how Gulf Coast Medical Center compares with other hospitals across the country:

These quality improvement efforts involve employees and physicians at every stage in the patient experience and are led by a multi-disciplinary Transformation Team.

 

Patient Safety - Signature Insights

A strong area of focus for Gulf Coast is patient safety. We believe we can add value to the delivery of care by providing nurses, physicians and anyone providing direct patient care, with insights - insights that can tie together the various facets of the patient experience from the many different departments in the hospital and route them where caregivers need them. Gulf Coast is equipped with a proprietary software product called Signature Insights - a unique system within the healthcare industry. We equip our caregivers with the information they need to ensure quality healthcare is being delivered to every patient that walks through their doors.

And what happens when you put good data in the hands of committed caregivers? After using the Insights engine for only a few months, Gulf Coast Medical Center already has success stories to tell, such as our medication errors improvement.

Process Improvement - Lean Thinking

One of the primary goals of Gulf Coast Medical Center is to continuously improve every patient's experience at the hospital. With the data gathered through tools like Insights, caregivers and administrative staff are armed with information to implement improvement. In many cases, negative experiences are caused not by careless people but by faulty systems. Gulf Coast is using Lean Thinking - as a means to evaluate and improve processes. Developed by the Toyota Manufacturing Company more than 30 years ago, the Lean principles allow people most directly involved in a process to closely evaluate the steps in the process and make improvements almost immediately.

Gulf Coast Medical Center is using Lean on a continuous basis as an improvement tool and has already made significant improvements in a couple of areas:

We understand that no one really wants to be a patient in the hospital; however, the time one spends there can be made either more or less compassionate, communicative, responsive, supportive, patient-focused and positive. We have chosen to make it more of all of these, and by doing so to raise the standard of care and customer service in the way we treat our patients.

To see information about what Gulf Coast and other Signature affiliated hospitals are doing in terms of value-added initiatives, see our latest issue of Insights Insider.