Our Commitment to Quality
Partners HealthCare is committed to making patient care better each day, across all parts of our system. This site is for those who want to better understand how we are doing this. It explains how we are improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care.
This is our first public progress report. We wrote it for patients, families, policymakers, employees, and all who are interested in the quality of health care. It shows our commitment to achieving the highest standards of patient care. And, it explains how we measure our performance.
In many, cases, we compare our performance to national benchmarks. These are practices widely accepted as "best" for certain types of care. But, in some cases, no benchmarks exist. In those cases, we set our own best practice standards or goals, and use these as our points of reference.
At Partners HealthCare we take great pride in having world-class facilities and personnel, and we also take great pride in having launched a system-wide initiative to ensure that delivery of care anywhere in the system is uniformly high quality, safe, and cost effective. Partners HealthCare has launched a program called High Performance Medicine, that has specifically addressed areas where improvement in performance was needed.
According to Dr. James Mongan, Partners HealthCare CEO, “High Performance Medicine goes beyond the clinical excellence of our individual physicians, nurses, and superb facilities. It means accepting our responsibility not just to assert our quality, but to demonstrate it; taking responsibility for identifying gaps in care and putting systems in place to address those gaps.”
This website tells that story and shares our progress reports with you.
High Performance Medicine
To date, we have focused on five key areas in High Performance Medicine. These areas are:
- Information Technology
- Patient Safety
- Consistent High Quality
- Care Coordination for Special Populations
- Efficiency and Cost Control
We have now added measures on outpatient care quality and patient experience to this High Performance Medicine Report Card.
We have added ambulatory (outpatient) care quality measures because we know that patients with certain conditions like asthma or diabetes benefit from specific tests, treatments, and medications; and many patients who are healthy can benefit from screening for these conditions. We also know that the health care industry can be slow to adopt these proven interventions. Clinical experts at Partners HealthCare work together to review recommended guidelines and standardize their best practices to ensure that patients get high quality, integrated care in their physician’s office, as well as in the hospital.
We have added patient experience measures to this Report Card because in addition to the quality, safety, and efficiency of care we deliver to our patients, we want to make sure we do what we can to make their hospital stay as comfortable as possible. We measure our performance on patient surveys and compare that feedback to the best hospitals nation-wide.
Thus, we present our progress to date and detail our work in these seven key areas.
Patients should find this site useful to assess the overall quality of care delivered in our hospitals. However, patients should talk openly with their caregiver to learn what place is right for their care.
We hope you find this information useful. More will be added over time. In the meantime, we would love to have your feedback.
Dr. James Mongan
President and CEO of
Partners HealthCare
High Performance Medicine
Co-Leaders
Thomas Lee,MD (left)
CEO, Partners Community HealthCare, Inc., and Partners Network President; primary care physician, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Sheridan Kassirer (right) Vice President, Quality Management and Clinical Programs, Partners HealthCare