Innovation: Strive for five

Big Aims quality efforts focus on five key areas

By: Lauren Irizarry

With the New Year comes a new approach for how UF Health’s Sebastian Ferrero Office of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety will tackle its Big Aims, which include reducing harm, reducing variation, enhancing the patient experience and transforming culture. This approach, called “Strive for Five,” focuses on five key areas:

1. Mortality — Decrease the aggregate observed-to-expected mortality rate.

2. Patient Safety Indicators — Increase the number of patient safety indicators that are in the top 25th percentile.

3. Core measures — Increase the number of core measures performing in the top 25th percentile.

4. Readmission — Decrease the 30-day all-cause readmission rate.

5. Patient Satisfaction — Increase the number of scores in the top 25th percentile on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems survey to five.

At the January Quality Grand Rounds, Randy Harmatz, M.B.A., UF Health senior vice president, chief quality officer and director of the UF Health Sebastian Ferrero Office of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety, explained the reasoning behind “Strive for Five.”

“To achieve our goal to be a top performer in patient safety and quality, we used the University HealthSystem Consortium accountability score card that

focuses on five critical measures,” she said. “We follow that because we want to be a five-star organization as outlined in our Forward Together strategic plan.

“By aligning our goals with the UHC measures, we’re striving to be the best we can be in terms of patient safety and quality. ‘Strive for Five’ is easy for people to remember and illustrates our common goal of becoming a five-star organization.”