According to Press Ganey, more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals and 95 percent of facilities that are Magnet® recognized by the American Nurses Credentialing Center, participate in the well-known National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators® (NDNQI) program.
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NDNQI is designed to measure nursing quality, nurse satisfaction, the nursing work environment, and staffing levels. The provision of unit-level reports supports the achievement of the highest levels of performance. Tracking up to 19 nursing-sensitive quality measures, it provides healthcare organizations with insight on structure, process and outcomes data.
However, as any caregiver who works in a healthcare organization’s nursing quality department can attest, collecting, compiling and submitting the data required by NDNQI can be a time-consuming task – especially if you are a multi-hospital health system, like Cleveland Clinic.
Additionally, from a nurse leader perspective, reviewing and measuring this important data efficiently and effectively can be challenging if the data isn’t comprehensive or easy to access.
At Cleveland Clinic, strategic decisions are rooted in data so nursing-sensitive quality data is routinely monitored and measured, including tracking and reporting both internally to the organization as well as to NDNQI. An important component to data reporting is data integrity – incorporating data accuracy, standardization, and efficiency of data collection and entry.
However, in 2015, Cleveland Clinic’s Executive Nursing Leadership team, led by Executive Chief Nursing Officer K. Kelly Hancock, DNP, RN, NE-BC, and Nursing Institute Administrator Chad Minor, MBA, concluded there was a clear need to streamline the health system’s unit-level nursing quality data entry and review processes. At the time, it was apparent nursing-specific quality metrics were being entered and displayed in numerous different manners, with possibly varying definitions.
Additionally, the rigor of data entry and decentralized reporting meant more time was being spent collecting and creating the reporting than analyzing the information and implementing process improvement efforts.
Thus, Cleveland Clinic’s Office of Nursing Quality and Practice partnered with the health system’s Business Intelligence group and Senior Business Intelligence Project Manager Brett Young to develop and create an appropriate data repository that would include all NDNQI-required data in one easy-to-access location.
Over the course of the next year, working side-by-side, the two teams created and built an in-house web application allowing each Cleveland Clinic hospital to enter NDNQI-required data into one centralized location.
The application is designed to not only analyze the data, but also to push standardized key performance metrics to enterprise dashboards automatically – eliminating the need for nursing quality caregivers to manually create reports.
Additionally, Cleveland Clinic’s Business Intelligence group worked with Press Ganey to directly connect the new data repository with NDNQI to facilitate automated submissions – a process done by less than 10 percent of Press Ganey’s clients.
Today, instead of the nursing quality caregivers from each Cleveland Clinic hospital entering data in numerous locations – including online data entry to NDNQI – the caregivers can enter data in one centralized location. And they can be confident that the data entered is represented in standardized enterprise reports, while meeting the NDNQI registry requirements.
With the new Nursing Unit Review dashboard, leaders now can easily access, monitor, report and measure nurse-sensitive indicators such as patient falls or hospital-acquired pressure ulcers. Further, the dashboard incorporates information from other nursing institute data sources, like the electronic medical record system, so leaders can get detailed unit-specific information on productivity/compliance, patient experience/HCAHPS, hand hygiene, and so on – in a true one-stop-shop.
Additionally, the dashboard promotes transparency and sharing of information across the system, allowing opportunities for continuous improvement and celebrations of target achievements.
While the Nursing Unit Review dashboard officially launched in January 2017, its success has been widely evident. To date, it averages more than 3,000 user hits per month, making it one of the most frequently used dashboards throughout the Cleveland Clinic health system.
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