Clinical Quality Report

Saving Lives through IHI Best Practices

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is a non-for-profit organization dedicated to improving patient care by turning best practices into actions. This is one of the initiatives White Memorial uses to track our clinical quality. IHI is made up of a diverse faculty of members from around the world, as well as a dedicated group of highly respected professionals, according to their Web site (www.ihi.org).

WMMC participates in one of IHI’s campaigns aimed at saving 100,000 lives nationwide through the consistent implementation of evidence-based medicine during a specific period of time. As part of this initiative, we collect two key statistics. First, we track the number of hospital deaths from heart attacks (Acute Myocardial Infarction Mortality Rate). And second, we track the incidence rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia for every 1,000 days that patients are connected to a ventilator (Ventilator-associated Pneumonia rate/1,000 ventilator days).

Between June 2005 and June 2006, WMMC was credited by IHI with saving 23 lives, which, based on all their health risks, were not expected to survive.