Kentucky Providers
Health Care Excel of Kentucky is the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for Kentucky.
It is contracted with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)—an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—to improve quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries, protect the integrity of the Medicare Trust Fund, focus on quality improvement initiatives, and promote preventive health care services. To achieve these goals, the Kentucky Medicare QIO works with Medicare beneficiaries, hospitals, nursing homes, and physician practices according to CMS guidelines.
Under the current CMS contract, the Kentucky Medicare QIO works with health care providers to reduce hospital-acquired infections, improve surgical care, reduce the use of physical restraints and the occurrence of pressure ulcers in nursing homes, and improve care management and increase rates of compliance in physician practices using electronic health records for influenza and pneumococcal immunizations and screenings for breast cancer and colorectal cancer.
- Beneficiary and Family Centered Care
- Improving Individual Patient Care
- Reducing Adverse Drug Events
- Integrating Care for Populations and Communities
- Improving Health for Populations and Communities
The QIO Program shares knowledge and offers expertise for better patient care, better population health, and lower health care costs through improvement. The QIO Program Progress Report demonstrates the benefits of working with your local QIO to improve your processes for delivering patient care.
Partnership for Patients is a public-private partnership launched by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to improve the quality, safety, and affordability of health care for all Americans. Health Care Excel has joined public and private organizations in Kentucky that have pledged their commitment to working together to stop millions of preventable health care-associated injuries and complications over the next three years.
The Partnership for Patients brings together leaders of major hospitals, employers, physicians, nurses, and patient advocates along with state and federal governments in a shared effort to make hospital care safer, more reliable, and less costly.
The partnership has two goals:
- Keeping patients from getting injured or sicker. Accidents happen, and too often patients in hospitals experience preventable harms. The initiative seeks to increase efforts to prevent harm to patients in hospitals. By the end of 2013, preventable hospital-acquired conditions would decrease by 40 percent. Achieving this goal would mean approximately 1.8 million fewer injuries to patients, with more than 60,000 lives saved over the next three years.
- Helping patients heal without complication. Patients are often most vulnerable when leaving the hospital to continue healing at home, in an assisted living facility, or in another care setting. The initiative seeks to improve continuity and effectiveness of care during transitions from one care setting to another and decrease preventable hospital readmissions within 30 days of discharge. By the end of 2013, preventable complications during a transition from one care setting to another would be decreased so that all hospital readmissions would be reduced by 20 percent. Achieving this goal would mean more than 1.6 million patients will recover from illness without requiring re-hospitalization in 30 days.
Participants in the Partnership for Patients pledge to join in a shared effort to save thousands of lives, stop millions of injuries, and take important steps toward a more dependable and affordable health care system. Take time today to sign up for this partnership. Your commitment to this effort will ensure that patients throughout Kentucky receive the highest quality health care. For more information, go to Partnership for Patients.
