Mercy Medical Center Benchmark Capella University

Mercy Medical Center Benchmark Capella University

Mercy Medical Center Benchmark Capella University

The success of health organizations depend largely on their performance against the set standards. Health organizations in the US determine their performance based on the standards set at the local, regional, and national levels. The evaluation of performance based on the set standards enables health organizations to determine the effectiveness of their adopted interventions and improvement strategies that should be implemented to achieve the set standards. Mercy Medical Center is an institution that is located in Shakopee, Minnesota. Therefore, this paper examines the institution’s dashboard metrics on diabetes to identify areas of strengths in performance, challenges, and improvements that are needed to ensure the realization of the desired level of quality, safety and efficiency in the organization.

In research, the literature review describes existing knowledge about the topic, reveals gaps and further research questions to be answered, and provides a rationale for engaging in a new study. The literature review provides evidence to answer clinical questions and make informed decisions in evidence-based practice. Quality improvement studies also begin with searching the literature to gather available knowledge about a problem and explore interventions used in other settings. The appearance of journals that predatory publishers publish has introduced the danger that reviews of the literature include inadequate, poorly designed, and low-quality information being used as “evidence”—raising the possibility of risky and harmful practice. A helpful literature review requires searching various reliable and credible databases such as MEDLINE (through PubMed or Ovid) and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), among others relevant to the topic. The ease of searching using a web browser (now commonly referred to as “googling”) has increased the risk of finding sources published in predatory. Low-quality journals that have not met the standards of research and scholarship can be regarded as credible and reliable evidence ( Oermann, Wrigley, Nicoll, Ledbetter, Carter-Templeton, & Edie, 2021).

Analysis of Dashboard Metrics against Benchmarks

Mercy Medical Center is one of the leading healthcare institutions in Minnesota. The institution is rated among the leading institutions with the highest safe surgery rating by the consumer advocacy magazine. The institution also won the Healthgrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award and Women’s Choice Award for the Best Hospital for Patient Experience in Emergency Care. It was also ranked among the Shakopee’s Ledger Top 20 Workplaces 2018 and 2019. The success of Mercy Medical Center depends largely on its ability to abide with the set standards in the local, regional and national levels. Mercy Medical Center evaluates its ability to achieve the set standards by comparing its performance with the set metrics by the state. Through it, the institution understand the effectiveness of its interventions in meeting safety and quality indicators in areas of care such as medication errors, falls, patient injuries, pressure sores, and documentation errors.

The analysis of dashboard metrics on diabetes for Mercy Medical Center shows that there was a rise in the number of HbA1c examinations from first quarter of 2018 to a peak in the first quarter of 2019. The first quarter of 2018 was characterized by 1 examination of HbA1c, rising to 123 in the first quarter of 2019 and falling sharply to 6 by the fourth quarter of 2019. The utilization of diabetes screening services is one of the ways in which patients at risk and affected by diabetes can be identified. Early identification of patients at risk and those affected is important because it enables the initiation of treatment and minimization of complications of diabetes. Poor management of diabetes is associated with complications that include diabetic foot, diabetic retinopathy and diabetic nephropathy (Joseph et al., 2017). The decline in the number of HbA1c examinations undertaken by Mercy Medical Center from the second quarter of 2019 therefore points towards low identification of the population risk of diabetes. Consequently, interventions that aim at increasing the uptake of diabetes screening services in Shakopee should be adopted.

The analysis of the race of the patients who were examined in 2019 showed that the majority of the patients who were screened for HbA1c were whites while the minority population comprised of the African Americans. The existing evidence shows that the rate of diabetes among individuals from ethnic minorities is significantly high. For example, African Americans are 1.3 times likely to be affected by diabetes than the American Whites. Despite the high risk and rate of diabetes