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About This Site
Not long ago, the best way to find out about the quality of care delivered at a particular hospital was by word of mouth.
Thanks to the recent focus on quality and safety at a national level and the rapid expansion of available performance measures, there are now many sources of good quality of information available to the public.
The purpose of our MGH site is to compile this information and complement it with other critical parts of the MGH’s quality and safety story. You will learn about our improvement programs. You will also see performance scores reported by race. You can even learn about the experience of patients who have been hospitalized at MGH and compare their experiences to those of hospital patients all around the country.
Massachusetts General Hospital has made all of this information – and more – available on this Web site. As you explore our site, what will you see?
Measuring Excellence at MGH
Quality of care is multi-dimensional; it encompasses safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity. Therefore, there is no single measure you can use to decide which hospital is best. What you can do is judge whether a hospital seems to be doing everything it can to deliver the best care possible to its patients – by adopting appropriate technologies; by hiring, training, and retaining great staff; by developing and maintaining state-of-the-art and patient-friendly facilities; and by practicing medicine in a way that consistently delivers the best and safest care possible for each individual patient.
On this Web site, you can see the many ways in which Massachusetts General Hospital demonstrates its commitment to excellence:
- People, facilities, and services
- Delivering the right care
- Keeping patients safe
- Listening to patients
- Providing equitable care
Under these headings, you will find several measures of the quality and safety of care the MGH provides. For each measure, you can read an explanation of the measure and see how our performance compares to either a national or state benchmark or, if a benchmark is not available, a goal we have set for ourselves. Our ultimate goal is to have universal adherence to the quality and safety practices and guidelines that we adopt and to reduce adverse events over time, to the lowest achievable level, and to zero, where possible. You can also find some information on what patients and their families can do to ensure that they receive high-quality care.
Measuring Improvement at MGH
Finally, you can see not just our performance at one point in time – but also our performance over time. We are not where we want to be on all measures of performance. Our dedicated physicians, nurses, and staff are constantly looking for ways to do things better – no matter how well we already do what we do. And scientific findings constantly present new quality and safety targets for us, thus we are constantly evolving our portfolio. For most of the measures on this site, you can read about what we are doing to improve and see the impact those changes are having on our performance. Specific improvement stories highlight some of the improvement programs here at MGH in more detail: