Quality - Patient Experience & Safety

At Luminis Health, we hold ourselves to the highest standards of care. You should hold us accountable, too.  The experience you have with your health care system should be a good one. The best way for us to know how good your experience was is to ask.

What is Patient Experience?

When you are a patient, certain things should happen during your health care journey. For example, it should be easy to access care. The care itself should follow standards. And providers and other staff should communicate with you clearly and thoroughly.

The health care industry has created a way to quantify this entire experience. It requires hospitals to ask patients questions about whether the behaviors that were supposed to happen as part of their health care experience actually happened.

Hospitals ask these questions in survey form. A third party administers the surveys and reports on the results. The survey we use to measure our inpatient results is called Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS).

You may receive this HCAHPS (pronounced “H-caps") survey after a visit with one of our hospitals. We use the results of this survey to improve our performance and celebrate our teams.

A website called Hospital Compare publishes this data.

What to Know About Patient Safety

Safety is our priority and we've embedded it in our culture. Everyone has a role in making health care safe. We encourage you, the patient, to be an active, involved and informed member of your health care team.

Here are some ways to do that:

• Speak up if you have questions or concerns and, if you don't understand, ask again. It's your body and you have a right to know.
• Pay attention to the care you are receiving. Make sure you're getting the right treatments and medications from the right health care professionals.
• Educate yourself about your diagnosis, the medical tests you are undergoing, and your treatment plan.
• Ask a trusted family member or friend to be your advocate.
• Know what medications you take and why you take them. Medication errors are the most common health care mistakes.
• Use a hospital, clinic, surgery center or another type of health care organization that has undergone on-site evaluation against established quality and safety standards, such as that provided by The Joint Commission.
• Participate in all decisions about your treatment. You are the center of the health care team.

If you have concerns about patient care or safety in one of our hospitals, contact our patient advocacy office at (443) 481-6890 for AAMC and (301) 552-0899 for DCMC.