Missouri Baptist Hospital, a 489-bed community hospital located in St. Louis, Missouri, has been a member of IHI’s IMPACT network since 2002. In 2003, they set an aggressive aim for their organization: to reduce mortality by 20 percent by 2005. Four years later, they have achieved a 22 percent reduction in their raw mortality rate. As they celebrate their success, they continue to work to hold their gains and to reduce their mortality rates even further.
How did they accomplish such a dramatic drop in raw mortality? Dr. John Krettek, Chief Medical Officer, and Nancy Sanders, RN, Performance Improvement Specialist, delivered a presentation on behalf of the hospital’s team at the May 2007 IMPACT network meeting in Los Angeles, California. The hospital attributes part of its success to the implementation of the six interventions in IHI’s 100,000 Lives Campaign, paired with their work in the Reducing Hospital Mortality Rates Learning and Innovation Community. Missouri Baptist also instituted a successful
Rapid Response Team, aggressive code reviews, a mortality review board, strict error reporting, and adverse event identification.
Other factors that Missouri Baptist credits for its success include aligning its mortality reduction work with organizational goals, creating a compelling vision of the “future state,” engaging the board as reviewers and participants, “over-communicating” with front-line staff about why they should change, continuously educating medical staff, and reporting organizational and physician-specific results.
Although the work at Missouri Baptist is far from over, the IMPACT Community salutes the spectacular achievements of the Missouri Baptist team to date. We look forward to learning and improving with them in the years ahead. For more information on the raw mortality reduction accomplished by Missouri Baptist, email Nancy Sanders at
nks0065@bjc.org.
