NJHA created its Institute for Quality and Patient Safety in 2002, and in the 12 years since has led a number of statewide collaboratives addressing key healthcare quality issues. NJHA’s Institute holds a contract with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a “hospital engagement network” charged with leading New Jersey providers in the work of the national Partnership for Patients quality improvement effort.

NJHA has achieved the following results focused specifically in the emergency department:

• Reduced the number of admitted patients that receive a urinary catheter and ensured that those with a catheter receive proper care and maintenance to prevent infection. Those efforts helped New Jersey hospitals achieve a 30.9 percent reduction in catheter-associated urinary tract infections, or CAUTIs. This work is part of the On the CUSP: Stop CAUTI Emergency Department Collaborative.
• Decreasing emergency department wait times for behavioral health patients by facilitating their placement to appropriate treatment settings. To support this effort, NJHA released its annual Acute Care Hospital Behavioral Health Volume Report, which showed that behavioral health volume in emergency departments increased from 289,851 in 2007 to 521,518 in 2012.
• Helping hospitals streamline patient flow, reduce costs and cut wait times in the emergency department through NJHA’s partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Optimization, which provides leadership on patient flow and “smoothing” in healthcare organizations. New Jersey hospitals that participated in this 15-month effort with NJHA and IHO achieved results such as: a 21 percent to 85 percent decrease in wait times for emergency department patients to be admitted to a hospital bed; and 20,000 additional patients that could be accommodated in hospital emergency departments.

“We enjoy working with the NJENA on these important issues affecting our patients, and we look forward to working with them on future initiatives that prevent avoidable harm and enhance the quality and patient safety in New Jersey’s emergency departments,” said Aline Holmes, RN, NJHA’s vice president of clinical affairs and director of the Institute for Quality and Patient Safety.