ICU: Saving lives, maintaining excellence

Mortality rates are a tricky thing to predict. At best, you have only that — a prediction. Community Hospital is one of more than 100 hospitals across the country to employ the APACHE III ICU benchmarking system, a state-of-the-art software program designed to indicate the expected mortality and length of hospital stay for patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

It is intended to create a benchmark, or standard, against which hospital staff can measure patient outcomes. “APACHE is not our exclusive decision-making tool for patients,” says Jomarie Faulkerson, R.N., APACHE coordinator. “It’s intended to give us an extra piece of information about where the patient’s health is going.”

The real success comes when, against all odds, a patient pulls through. Last spring, the Cerner Corporation, vendor for the APACHE III, announced it was distinguishing Community Hospital’s ICU as a “Best Demonstrated Practice” site of sustained excellence during the past two years.

“Cerner’s criteria for this designation was basic and highly relevant,” says Community Hospital’s Dr. Steven Packer, president/CEO. “Intensive care units that, over a two-year period, consistently demonstrated a standardized mortality ratio less than 1.0 were distinguished. This means that fewer patients died in Community Hospital’s ICU over the past two years than would have been expected based on their diagnosis and how ill they were.

“More simply, our ICU has been found, in an objective and very credible way, to have consistently saved lives due to our focus on patient safety and tradition of clinical excellence.”

Community Hospital is one of only 14 hospitals across the country honored with the Best Demonstrated Practice designation. Lauren Hannon, senior project leader for Cerner, encouraged other ICUs to discover the “secrets to their success.”

“We already know what that secret is, however,” says Packer. “It’s our skilled and dedicated staff who strive every day to be a shining example of the excellence we wish to foster at Community Hospital.”