Experiences from Brazil

Geschreven door: Els Keesman | Datum: Monday March 26th, 2018 | Categoriën: , Nieuws

Last week we visited the Unimed Hospital in Recife, Brazil. Recife is an agglomeration with 3.7 million inhabitants. We talked about the 3 hospital outcome measures used in Reflex (hospital mortality, long length of stay an unplanned readmission) and how to extract this from their administrative data.  There is plenty of data, just like in any hospital in Brazil, but people are modest about the quality and the potential for quality management. However, in our Reflex pilot in 10 Brazilian hospitals we show that this can be very useful.

We detect hundreds of unplanned readmissions, hospital stays that are far too long and unexpected hospital mortality from the data. Those numbers can be reduced and people also think that they should. There is a lot of suffering behind those figures, and what to think a lot of the costs of, for example, an unplanned readmission for an infection following a procedure. This is quite a challenge. Not only for Brazil, but also for the Netherlands, where an average hospital has 6 unplanned readmissions.