Our Commitment to Quality
The Quality Promise that Emory Healthcare makes to our patients is to provide optimal clinical outcomes and deliver outstanding service and the best medical care available, while increasing patient safety and satisfaction. To fulfill our promise, we recognize the importance of setting specific goals and selecting and prioritizing activities and projects that are aligned with our mission and objectives, and are driven by data, benchmarks and best practices. Achievement of these goals requires not only meaningful metrics but also a supportive workplace culture.
Our Web site provides a variety of quality data, including the quality measures of the Emory Healthcare balanced scorecard that help our leaders and staff focus on our performance as measured against established targets.
Emory Healthcare's Quality Goal
The FY2012 Goal for Quality is to achieve continuous enhancements in clinical outcomes, patient safety, and service, resulting in a national ranking for quality among the top 10 percent of academic medical centers in the U.S. according to the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) and Press Ganey. In benchmarking ourselves to other academic medical centers, we are comparing ourselves to the top ranked hospitals in the country. Emory University Hospital (EUH) has the highest “case mix index” among all the UHC hospitals, which means that EUH treats the very sickest patients in the country. Most data comparisons do not take this severity fully into account, which naturally affects the results of relative performance improvement measures when assessing certain quality outcomes.
About the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC)
The University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC), formed in 1984 and headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, is a national organization of health care leaders, which helps members deliver world-class patient care. UHC is an alliance of 113 academic medical centers and 254 of their affiliated hospitals representing approximately 90 percent of the nation’s nonprofit academic medical centers. By providing an objective third-party source of comparative national quality data, UHC helps its members achieve excellence in such areas as quality, patient safety, cost-effectiveness and accountability.
