1. Clinical Risk and Quality Management

As in recent years, the quality of clinical care was the main focus during the reporting period. In order to guarantee a high quality of medical care and to steadily increase it, we have also developed and instigated individual quality management procedures in parallel with the already established tools and analysis systems.

For example, we are partners and members of 4QD-Qualitätskliniken.de GmbH, which pursues the aim of promoting the transparency of the quality of healthcare services. This means that patients can refer to an internet site that compares individual hospitals. However, the clinics also benefit from this system. They can derive the requisite quality improvements from the available data and implement them.

We are also members of the “Initiative Qualitätsmedizin” (IQM) initiative. In this context, we are calling for even better medical quality in patient treatment, together with other hospitals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The quality assurance requirements of the IQM member hospitals therefore go far beyond the existing legal regulations. In addition, we and our partner clinics in the “Wir für Gesundheit” (“We stand for Health”) clinic network are committed to implementing strict and measurable medical quality criteria in our clinics.

VARIOUS INDICATORS ENSURE PROGRESS

General key figures are often inadequate when it comes to the improvement of medical procedures: an increased mortality rate in one specialist department, for example, tells us nothing about which steps in the diagnosis and treatment process should be improved. This calls for a more in-depth analysis. That is precisely where the “indicative key figures” (e.g. duration of operation or complication rates) come into it: they highlight cases where the treatment process could probably still be improved and which therefore merit closer examination.

In consideration of the best possible medical procedures in our clinics, we continuously evaluate other local clinic or department results. Such an evaluation does not necessarily have to lead to procedural changes. The analysis is just as helpful for the constant monitoring of the actual meaning of the current indicators, and for making changes, if necessary.

However, successful treatment consists of more than just the objectively measured quality of the diagnostics and the therapy. A subjective evaluation of the treatment by the patient is just as important. The more satisfied a patient is, the more likely they are to establish a trust-based relationship with the doctor treating them, which can be decisive for the success of a treatment. As objectively, the quality of medical results and the subjective patient satisfaction may differ from each other, we consider the recording of patient satisfaction and the conventional result benchmarking to be equally important. In this way, we can use our patients’ evaluations directly to improve internal procedures and the service quality.

CLINICAL RISK MANAGEMENT INCREASES SECURITY

Another significant development in recent years has been stronger risk management. For instance, the GBA (Joint Federal Committee) stipulates that the introduction of a risk management system in hospitals is mandatory. Any kind of scope for potential damages and errors is recorded in a company’s risk management system in order to learn from past incidents for the future, and to avoid errors being made or the damage that was done being repeated. This ranges from an improvement suggested by a member of staff to the analysis of a potential claim for compensation. In addition to the many already existing methods such as CIRS (Critical Incident Reporting System) or morbidity and mortality meetings, we are currently establishing a comprehensive risk management system. As an important element of this, we have carried out risk audits with Gesellschaft für Risikoberatung, a company specialised in risk consulting and patient safety monitoring. Besides improving the quality of patient care, this covers another important aspect: an increasing number of insurers link the acceptance of liability risks to systematic prevention aimed at minimising these liability risks and meeting patient expectations with regard to safe care. This addresses such diverse topics as the transparency of risk factors in treatment procedures, increasing patient safety through risk prevention measures, increasing the quality standard and the competitiveness of the hospital, or reducing liability damages. Specific measures include, for example, the introduction of checklists to ensure a greater level of safety during operations, or the so-called prevention of falls, but also the existence of a systemic risk-management system.