What Hospital Executives Should Know About HLQAT

I'll start with the definition. HLQAT stands for Hospital Leadership & Quality Assessment Tool and the core team is pronouncing this either "Hel-Cat" or "Hospital L-Cat."

HLQAT is being created in a public-private partnership between QIOs (chiefly led by the Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality), CMS, the University of Iowa College of Public Health, and Premier/CareScience. AHA, IHI, and many other organizations (now including ActiveStrategy) are advising and contributing to the tool and its testing and implementation. This broad level of participation tells me that the HLQAT will gain quick acceptance.

So what will it do? HLQAT will be an assessment tool to help hospitals identify and adopt quality-oriented leadership systems and ultimately improve clinical care processes and outcomes. As part of the HLQAT testing and implementation phases, responses to the survey are being correlated to quality data from the CMS data warehouse, as well as other data sources. This correlation phase will allow HLQAT to provide significant insights into the linkages between quality outcomes and a hospital's leadership structures, processes, and activities.

Once it's complete later this spring, QIOs will be using the HLQAT to identify key areas of opportunity for hospitals (HLQAT is now in the CMS statement of work for QIOs). The tool will also be publicly available as a self-assessment tool, and will be accompanied by a "toolkit" that will help hospitals address weaknesses identified during the assessment.

I think of it as a mini-Baldrige assessment tied to national benchmark quality data.

For those of you who are leading roll-outs of Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Strategy Execution frameworks, HLQAT will be very exciting in terms of achieving and maintaining buy-in from your top executives. HLQAT is going to link those executive structures, processes, and activities with benchmarked quality results across the nation. HLQAT will help you justify active participation from the executive team in your BSC framework by demonstrating how that participation translates into results.

Plus, hospital executives will be excited to see a roadmap for changes based on HLQAT that they can make in their leadership activities to help create a culture of quality and safety in the hospital.

As I’ve said many times before, a BSC framework is the right tool for achieving sustained clinical quality results, but it is ONLY a tool. Without active participation from senior leadership (role modeling behavior, accountability, and prioritization of improvement activities), quality outcomes will simply not improve.

Comments

[Recruit Hospital Executives]

Useful information about HLQAT for hospital executives.

[Kelly Stuart]

You are generally so insightful, Good timely topic..