Measuring Quality Care
At Essentia Health, our values guide everything we do. Within each of our hospitals and clinics, we uphold a common set of values: Quality, Hospitality, Respect, Justice, Stewardship and Teamwork. Guided by these values, we’ve made the commitment to become a national leader in providing the highest quality and most cost-effective, integrated care for our patients. Delivering the best quality care is our highest priority.
We believe quality care is how we can best achieve our mission of making a healthy difference in people’s lives. Quality care improves the outcomes for our patients and lowers the cost of care. Quality care is safe and provides the right care at the right time. Quality care is based on the best scientific evidence, yet is also personalized. Simply stated, quality care is how you and your family expect to be treated.
We recognize that we must be open and transparent about our quality performance to our patients, our medical staff, our nursing staff and our communities. We have a sacred trust to care for our patients and transparency is vital to secure this trust. Transparency is the public disclosure of accurate and reliable information that allows our patients, physicians and all others to assess our quality. We also recognize that there are choices when it comes to healthcare providers. Our patients expect and deserve the best quality care and our commitment to transparency allows us to identify both our strengths and weaknesses. It also helps to focus on the improvements we make for our patients.
Our transparency initiatives are based on the principles of accurate, unbiased reporting through information collected by an independent source. We will not display information to make our performance appear better than it actually is. The information will reveal successes as well as areas where we need to improve. We realize that data and statistics do not capture all of what is involved in quality healthcare and may not always accurately reflect the intangible but important relationship that patients have with their physicians and care team.
The first week in January, our transparency initiatives will begin with public displays of quality information in the lobbies of our clinics in downtown Duluth, Brainerd and Fargo and in the lobbies of three hospitals: Essentia Health – St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth, Essentia Health – Fargo and Essentia Health – St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Brainerd. In the coming months, we will expand these displays to include quality metrics in all Essentia Health hospitals and clinics.
As a patient, you have the right to expect that your care is as good as it can be. You also have the right to access information that will help you make informed decisions about where to seek the best care. We want to be your first choice for care and will continue to measure and improve everything we do in order to exceed expectations in every aspect of your care. Below, we’ve provided links to Essentia Health’s quality metrics and to a site that allows you to compare metrics among various hospitals. Your care is our privilege and we thank you for entrusting us. We welcome your comments about what quality care means to you.