The Nebraska HIIN will be receiving the AHA Performance Improvement Award based on the exemplary improvement we have achieved on the AHA/HRET HIIN program.  “This award speaks not only to the outstanding efforts by our NHA HIIN staff; Dana Steiner and Andrea Cramer-Price;  but, most importantly, to the hospital quality leaders who are giving great patient care and making sure their data tells that story effectively,” remarked Margaret Woeppel, VP Quality Initiatives for the Nebraska Hospital Association. 

Nebraska hospital quality leaders have been tackling progressively more difficult CMS driven metrics in the quest for safe patient care. HRET-HIIN has tasked our member hospitals with reducing patient harm by 20% and readmissions by 12% as evidence of 90% of hospitals submitting complete data on a monthly basis and demonstrating improvement in 70% of applicable measures.

In the past year, the focus has been on:

• increased transparency
• implementation of a statewide rural QI residency program
• publishing best practices related to opioid management
• providing an easy to access resource database
• developing appropriate communication and touchpoints between hospitals and NHA staff 

In the upcoming year, in addition to running rapid improvement programs on HIIN designated metrics, we look forward to specific work on a culture of patient safety, sepsis, transitions of care, violence, patient family engagement and disparities.

The 2019 AHA Performance Improvement awards presentation will take place on Wednesday, July 24
in conjunction with the AHA Leadership Summit in San Diego.