PCCI and Parkland Health & Hospital System receive NAPH 2013 Gage Award

DALLAS, June 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) and Parkland Health & Hospital System have received an honorable mention in the 2013 Gage Awards Improving Quality category for innovative work to reduce preventable hospital readmissions for heart failure.

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PCCI, a non-profit research and development corporation that specializes in predictive and surveillance analytics in healthcare, was honored with the award during the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems (NAPH) 2013 Annual Conference, June 19 to 21, in Hollywood, Fla.

The NAPH Gage Awards Program—named after NAPH founder and safety net advocate Larry S. Gage—honors and shares the outstanding work of member hospitals and health systems. The Improving Quality category recognizes activities that have improved the quality of care delivered or reduced or eliminated harmful events to individual patients or groups of patients.

PCCI President and CEO Ruben Amarasingham, MD, MBA, and his team developed the PIECES™ software system to help providers improve patient safety and care quality by allocating resources to the right patients at the right time. PIECES™ extracts data from the hospital's electronic medical record to identify and stratify in real time patients at high risk for adverse clinical events.

"We are extremely proud of the ground-breaking program developed by Dr. Ruben Amarasingham and his team at PCCI," said Debbie Branson, chair of Parkland's Board of Managers. "The innovative software developed by PCCI is helping Parkland improve patient safety and the quality of health care in the hospital."

The need to reduce preventable readmissions has received national attention, and heart failure is recognized as the greatest driver of readmissions. In 2007, PCCI launched a quality improvement program to reduce preventable heart failure readmissions at Parkland by applying evidence-based approaches to high-risk patients classified by an electronic coordination and decision support system, PIECES™.

The program has reduced heart failure readmissions by 19 percent overall and Medicare heart failure readmissions by 31 percent. In 2011, PCCI received a $2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to strengthen the program for use in three additional hospitals.

"The work by Parkland and PCCI is an outstanding example of the innovation we see among our members and their leadership in safety and quality improvement that moves us toward real reform," NAPH President and CEO Bruce Siegel, MD, MPH, said.

SOURCE PCCI