Children's hospitals have new national benchmarks for pediatric hospital care.
The Pediatric Hospital Medicine Achievable Benchmarks of Care (ABC) Report Card identifies where pediatric hospitals can improve quality and reduce unnecessary care for some of the most common conditions in pediatric hospital care.
“If we improve performance in these measures across the country, it means better outcomes for kids and lower costs for families,” said Torey Mack, MD, chief medical officer at the Children’s Hospital Association.
With the new ABC Report Card, hospitals can see how the best of their peers are performing across 115 measures for 13 common conditions — turning everyday clinical decisions into actionable opportunities to improve the quality, safety, and value of pediatric hospital care.
Derived from the real-world performance of leading children’s hospitals, the report card shows what’s possible and sets a new bar for pediatric hospital medicine.
Measures that matter
Using data from CHA’s Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS), researchers from several children’s hospitals and CHA identified 115 measures for 13 conditions hospitalists see frequently and where care can differ considerably from one hospital to another.
The measures, published in Pediatrics, look beyond how long children stay in the hospital or whether they return after discharge. They also capture how hospitals use imaging, lab tests, procedures, and medications.
For a child with pneumonia, asthma, or another common condition, some of the most consequential decisions involve whether to order an X-ray, draw blood for testing, use a broad-spectrum antibiotic, or continue antibiotics through an IV.
Across thousands of hospital stays, those decisions add up. They shape a child’s experience, influence the resources available to other patients, and affect the cost of care for families.
“We learned that traditional markers aren’t the most optimal markers for improvement,” Mack said. “These benchmarks align improvements with care that has tremendous impact.”
The ABC Report Card shows how a hospital’s performance compares with the benchmarks and where the biggest opportunities are. That helps leaders decide where an improvement effort is likely to make the greatest difference.
“Many of these measures already have evidence-based guidelines hospitals can apply, which is part of the reason they were chosen,” Mack said. “They don’t have to reinvent the wheel in every area they want to improve.”
The report card can also help identify national priorities for improvement. When many hospitals are working to improve the same measures, CHA can use those insights to connect hospitals, share effective practices, and accelerate progress across the field.
Children’s hospitals have shown what is possible when they work together. Through nationwide collaboratives, they have reduced kidney infections, lowered sepsis mortality, and driven patient lengths of stay to historic lows. The report card brings that same focus to hundreds of daily clinical decisions that influence a hospital’s resources, a child's experience, and a family’s costs.
Aiming for excellence
The ABC Report card is not like most industry benchmarks, which are based on median performance.
The middle is no place to set the bar.
These benchmarks look to the leading edge of pediatric care, using results already achieved by children’s hospitals to set an ambitious and attainable standard for the field.
“They’re designed to show what’s possible,” Mack said. “Because kids deserve more than average. They deserve our best.”
