UWF ?Baptist vs West Florida Hospitals Hospital Compare Analysis Essay

I’m working on a Health & Medical exercise and need support.

The Hospital Compare project will be submitted in two milestones before submission of the final report. Each milestone includes two steps. The final report (i.e. data presentation and two-step essay) will need to address all feedback received on the milestone assignments and must be submitted as one cohesive APA formatted document. Data is best placed in final document as an Appendix after the reference list.

• 1st Milestone (Data) – Two steps – (1) Data Gathering and (2) Data Presentation
  • Step 1: Data Gathering:
    • Research the CMS Hospital Compare (Links to an external site.) website, and then use it to explore at least two hospitals in your zip code area. Hospital Compare is part of the CMS Hospital Quality Initiative. The HQI uses a variety of tools to help stimulate and support improvements in the quality of care delivered by hospitals.
    • Thoroughly explore EVERY indicator for ONLY the following two categories for each of the hospitals you have selected – explore each hospital separately not at the same time:

1. 1. • 1. Survey of Patients’ Experiences
        2. Timely and Effective Care
      • Do not report on the following categories also found on this website: General Information, Complications & Deaths, Unplanned Hospital Visits, Psychiatric Unit Services, Payment and Value of Care.

• • • The point of this project is to thoroughly explore the outcome indicators on the Hospital Compare website for 2 hospitals in your zip code area. You are researching to find the significant outlier indicators for each hospital – either positive or negative – compared to benchmark (state and/or national data). PLEASE DO NOT randomly report on the same 10 indicators for both hospitals – report the 10 for each hospital that are important because the hospital is performing either much better than or much worse than the state and/or national benchmarks.
    • If you are unable to find 10 outliers for both of your hospitals (i.e. positive or negative compared to the benchmarks), you may need to include some that are comparable to the benchmarks in order to report on at least 10. However, your final report must demonstrate a thorough review of the indicator data in the two assigned categories for both hospitals you have selected.
  • Step 2 – Table or graph presentation:
• Create a table or graph for each hospital that clearly and concisely demonstrates your comparative data – hospital versus both state AND national benchmarks. ALL three data points must be presented. Present each hospital separately.
• If you are building a table, make sure to include a final column that calculates the “most significant difference” (i.e. hospital minus state vs. hospital minus national – whichever is greater) for each indicator. You might even consider using green type color to indicate positive variance data for the county and red color to indicate poor variance data for the county! Be creative!
• Data must be standardized (i.e. in a comparable format) and units must be labeled.
• Final data presentation must be in Word format. Tables can easily be created in Word. If you are choosing to graph your data, create the graphs in excel and import to Word for submission.
• Table or graphs must include citation to indicate the source of your data on the reference list.
• Be creative! Here is one example of how the table or graph for this assignment might take shape for one of the two hospitals:

• 2nd Milestone (Essay): Two Steps – (1) Data Summary and (2) Recommendations
  • Essay Step 1: Analyze and summarize the data for each of the two hospitals presented in your charts or graphs in narrative form as unfavorable or favorable compared to the state and national benchmarks using ONLY the variances (i.e. how much higher or lower the hospital is compared to benchmarks) to demonstrate their significance. Do not repeat all the individual data points in your essay.

• Essay Step 2: You are the consultant assigned to review this data on behalf of the hospitals. For ALL data points you find to be significantly UNFAVORABLE (i.e. poor hospital performance), RESEARCH the scholarly/credible literature and explain to your hospital clients:
  • 1) Potential causes of the problem. What does the scholarly literature present as potential causes for each issue presented as unfavorable? 2) Potential solutions or process improvement strategies that can be implemented to improve the problem. What does the scholarly literature present as potential solutions or process improvement strategies for each issue presented as unfavorable.
  • Both potential causes and solutions must be presented for each unfavorable area of performance. These are not the same thing. For example, if you find the use of medical imaging is significantly higher than the national average, RESEARCH and explain potential causes (example: the practice of defensive medicine), and RESEARCH process improvement changes they might consider to reduce the use of imaging without impacting quality of care (example: interdisciplinary team review of ordering practices).

• • Be creative. Research ONLY scholarly/credible journal articles found through sources such as the UWF library databases or Google Scholar. Include these sources on your reference list with corresponding APA in-text citation.
• Your written essay (i.e. Step 1 and Step 2 above – not including tables or graphs from the 1st Milestone) must be at least FIVE full pages in length in Word format. You will want to be complete and concise (i.e. quality not quantity!). Your grade will be based on how thoroughly and creatively you completed each step of the assignment.

• Your essay MUST BE in proper APA format (i.e. title page, running head, body format, reference list, in-text citation, etc.). APA Reference Style Guidelines and an APA Sample Paper are provided in the course Table of Contents – Important Course Information and many tutorials are available online to show you how to set an APA running head, etc. Note: an abstract page is NOT needed for this assignment.

Project Format Notes:

• Although you will be submitting the essay in milestones, the final submission should include both Milestone submissions as ONE cohesive APA formatted document. Data presentation should be submitted as an Appendix after the reference list.
• Turnitin software is used to determine what percentage of your work is copied from other documents or websites. Concepts taken from your sources must be presented/written in your own words whenever possible, using proper APA in-text citation to indicate which source on your reference list was used.