SGMC Berrien and Lanier Campuses Recognized for Focus on Quality Improvement
Friday, March 17th, 2023
South Georgia Medical Center's Berrien and Lanier Campuses were recognized for "outstanding commitment to quality improvement" by the Georgia Hospital Association and Alliant Health Solutions. This comes after their participation in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Quality Improvement Collaborative (HQIC).
HQIC is a CMS-funded, 4-year project, established to partner with hospitals across the nation in rural, critical access, and urban settings that provide care for vulnerable populations in order to improve outcomes in patient safety-related areas.
Areas of focus include decreasing adverse drug events, promoting infection prevention, promoting patient and family engagement, promoting health equity, decreasing readmissions, decreasing other harm areas, and promoting opioid-safe prescribing.
SGMC Berrien and Lanier campuses were identified as top-performing hospitals in the following categories: sepsis mortality: non-covid; and no adverse drug events.
SGMC Director of Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Scarlett Rivera shared, “Our number one focus is patient safety for all of our patients who entrust us with their care every day. We look forward to working with all of the hospitals in the GHA program collaborative over the next two years.”
This is just one of many programs across the health system which focus on patient safety. SGMC also partnered with Press Ganey to become a High Reliability Organization (HRO). An HRO is an organization with predictable and repeatable systems that support consistent operations while catching and correcting potentially catastrophic errors before they happen.
SGMC Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brian Dawson said, "SGMC is focused on being the safest health system in the nation through proven best practices and participating in programs that help us identify areas where we excel, as well as areas where we can improve."
SGMC hospital campuses in Lowndes, Lanier, and Berrien counties are accredited by DNV's accreditation program, Integrated Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, also called NIAHO®.
DNV integrates the ISO 9001 Quality Management System with the Medicare Conditions of Participation. ISO 9001 relies on systematic, repeatable, and well-deployed practices that ensure safe patient care. It is the most widely-accepted quality management system in use around the world and provides a strong foundation for hospital quality, patient safety, and high-reliability programs.
