Improve Quality
Promote Quality Improvement
Improve Quality of Care across the Lifespan
Good information about the cost and quality of care is essential for improving our health care system. Vermont’s health care reform contains several initiatives to increase the availability of this information:
- Improvements to existing information to make transparent price and quality information about medical treatments available to the public beginning July, 2008
- A Patient Safety Surveillance and Improvement System to improve patient safety, eliminate adverse events, and support quality improvement efforts in hospitals.
- Hospital nurse staffing measures must be made available to patients and the public in Hospital Community Reports and through daily public posting in hospitals.
- Information on hospital-acquired infections will be reported to the public on an annual basis through hospital community reports.
- A voluntary, pilot SorryWorks! program in which physicians and hospitals promptly acknowledge and apologize for mistakes in patient care that result in harm and offer fair settlements.
- Enhancements to Vermont’s Advanced Directives process and registry.
- A multi-payer database that contains claims data from all private and public insurance plans will help the state better understand the effectiveness and efficiency of our health care system.
