Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2016
Center
for Health Statistics
Texas Health Care Information Collection
This report is focused on the quality of care of children. The
report includes information on hospitals that treat only children, as well as
hospitals that treat both children and adults. A Guide
to Understanding the Hospital-Specific Pediatric Quality Reports is available and provides more
information about this report. Consumers should rely on several sources of
information to make healthcare choices, and not rely solely on this report.
Factors that may affect your selection of a hospital for your child include
which services (benefits) your child’s health plan covers, convenience, where
your child’s doctor practices and recommendations from family and friends. You
can use this information to talk with your child’s doctor and hospital, and
take a more active role in making health care decisions for your child.
Hospital-specific
indicators of quality show how Texas hospitals performed in calendar year 2016.
Hospitals may provide comments explaining their performance on the quality
indicators, and these may be helpful to gain a full understanding of a
hospital's score. If the hospital provided comments, its name will be followed
by (C) which links to the information submitted.
Hospitals
that treat only children are more likely to treat complex cases and may treat
patients transferred from other hospitals. The report separates children's
hospitals from other hospitals. For this report children's hospitals are
defined as members of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and
Related Institutions (NACHRI) or the Children's Hospital Association of Texas
(CHAT). These hospitals include freestanding children’s hospitals, children’s
specialty hospitals and children’s hospitals within a larger hospital. For some
larger facilities, discharges from the children’s specialty unit cannot be separated
from other data for the facility. For those facilities, the information
included in the reports below may include patients under age 18 discharged from
other units within the hospital. Because the two types of hospitals are likely
to treat children with different severities of illness or levels of complexity,
comparisons of hospitals should be done with this in mind.
Important Note: Starting 2015, a
significant change in coding systems occurred. Federal requirements
necessitated the change in coding systems, from the International
Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) to
the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical
Modification (ICD-10-CM) and International Classification of Diseases, Tenth
Revision, Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS). The change occurred on October
1, 2015. The change will make the data difficult to utilize and compare between
2016 data and between QI reports from previous years. 2016 measures are not
risk-adjusted due to this being the first year of data using the ICD-10-CM/PCS
codes.
Information on the care of the adult population is available
in Indicators
of Inpatient Care in Texas Hospitals. This report on the quality of care of children is limited to
children under age 18.
Guide
to Understanding the Hospital-Specific Quality of Children's Care Reports
QUALITY INDICATORS
This section has information about four indicators of the quality of care for
children in the hospital. The information covers care provided to children
under the age of 18. A quality indicator is a piece of information, a
complication rate, that shows how often something that may have been
preventable occurred during the child’s stay in the hospital. Because some
hospitals may limit their surgeries to simpler kinds of cases, and send more
complex cases with a higher risk of complications to other hospitals, it may
not be appropriate to compare children's hospitals with community hospitals.
Accidental
Puncture or Laceration
This
indicator shows the number of injuries that occurred during a procedure,
specifically accidental cuts, punctures, perforations or lacerations. These
injuries can possibly be prevented through proper technique during procedures.
Complex procedures can be more difficult in children than in older patients
because of their size. This makes accidental injuries harder to prevent.
Perioperative
Hemorrhage or Hematoma
This
indicator tells how often children bled too much (called hemorrhage), or
developed a large blood clot (called a hematoma) after an operation. Bleeding
after a procedure or getting a blood clot can be an issue of concern for
children.
Postoperative
Wound Dehiscence
Wound dehiscence
is the parting of the layers of a surgical wound. Either the surface layers
come apart or the whole wound splits open. The complication is rare in
children, but children with certain bowel or spleen disorders may be at higher
risk for this to happen.
Iatrogenic
Pnemothorax in Non-neonates
This
indicator tells how often air leaked out of a child’s lung because it was
accidentally punctured (iatrogenic refers to an accidental occurrence) because
of a medical procedure. Complex procedures performed near the lungs can be more
difficult in children than in older patients because of their smaller lung
size.
Developed
by THCIC using Inpatient Quality Indicators software, Version 7.0 Beta, released September 2017 by
the Agency for Healthcare Research
and Quality.
Related Reports
Hospital
admissions for these conditions can potentially be reduced with the timely and
effective use of primary care. Hospitalizations may be prevented when
clinicians diagnose, educate and treat patients in a timely and effective
manner in outpatient settings. Higher rates of possibly preventable
hospitalizations may identify areas where improvements can potentially be made
in access to care or in the quality of the health care system. (maps and
tables)
Information for 2008 is included in the latest version of Preventable
Hospitalizations. This
report also provides information for 14 conditions on potentially preventable
hospitalizations of the adult population, age 18 and older, for 2008.
Texas Health Data
Quality of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2015
Quality of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2014
Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2013
Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2012
Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2011
Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2010
Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2009
Quality
of Children's Care in Texas Hospitals, 2008