HSMR helps Southlake in patient safety planning
Monday September 24, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
By investing in the Hospital Standardized Mortality Ratio (HSMR), Barb Kendrick says Southlake Regional Health Centre is hoping for some evidenced-based direction in regards to future patient safety initiatives.

Kendrick, the director of quality and planning at Southlake, spoke about her organization’s experience using the HSMR at the Ontario Healthcare Risk Management Network’s 2nd Annual Risk Management Conference Sept. 10.

“Resources are always limited and we can’t do everything so the analysis piece becomes more important in trying to prioritize where might be the next thing we might improve that would have the most impact,” Kendrick says.

Kendrick describes the HSMR as a high-level Big Dot indicator that gives hospitals a sense of where they sit relative to other Canadian hospitals in terms of mortality.

The HSMR was first introduced in the United Kingdom in the mid-90s by Sir Brian Jarman and has made its way to Canada, as well as the United States, Holland and Sweden.

When the Safer Healthcare Now (SHN) Campaign launched in 2005, there was interest among hospitals and regional health authorities in having a tool that understands changes in patient outcomes. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) was approached and asked if the HSMR project could be applied in Canada to track hospital mortality rates.

Southlake received their first set of HSMR data in December 2005.

“We wanted something by which we could measure ourselves and our goal of improving patient safety,” Kendrick says. The HSMR has indicated a decrease in inpatient mortality which Kendrick attributes to Southlake’s participation in the six SHN interventions.

Going into the future, Kendrick says it would be helpful for hospitals to be able to produce HSMR data internally providing timelier access to the data. The data Southlake received in 2005 is based on inpatient outcomes from 2003 and 2004.

Kendrick says it takes “a fair bit of time” for HSMR data to translate into the creation of patient safety initiatives.

“We believe it’s important and we want to be able to work with it but for it to be really helpful, it needs to be timely,” she says.

E-mail hsmr@cihi.ca for more information or to sign up.