Bayfront Health St. Petersburg announces quality improvements

St. Petersburg, FL – (April 28, 2021) – Today Bayfront Health St. Petersburg is announcing quality improvements achieved during its first six months of operation under Orlando Health ownership. The quality-specific update demonstrates significant gains in the quality of care provided to patients.

“As soon as we took over operations, we conducted listening tours as part of our full assessment of healthcare quality and identified several areas that we felt needed immediate attention,” said John Moore, president, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg. “We have learned from our most important resource, team members and physicians, on how to improve. With their guidance, we have worked with our clinical teams, coordinated and strengthened processes and enhanced the workplace environment – all of which have an impact on patient care.” 

During its first six months of operation, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg focused on transitions of care from the hospital to the community, which impacts patient readmission rates; improved timeliness and efficiency of care, which improves patient flow and reduced infection rates, which are a key to patient safety. Hospital leadership also made as a top priority caring for team members by enhancing pay, benefits and staffing, and caring for the community by administering a COVID-19 vaccination program.

Since taking over hospital operations on October 1, 2020, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg has seen improvements in the following areas:

• A 16.4 percent reduction in hospital acquired infections
• A 5.3 percent improvement in patient safety
• Improvements in several key measures related to patient experience:
  • Physician communication improved nearly 10 percent
  • Responsiveness improved nearly six percent
  • Willingness to recommend the hospital improved by more than five percent
  • Nurse communications improved nearly four percent

“We are pleased with these early results,” said Mr. Moore. “We know our quality improvements won’t be fully reflected in national hospital quality measurement services for several years, but we will continue to work as quickly and as thoroughly as possible to improve quality for patients, the hospital and the community. Like other Orlando Health facilities that have been recognized as Fortune/IBM Watson Health Top 100 hospitals, our objective is for Bayfront Heath St. Petersburg to continue delivering top notch services that will help us reach this level of success.”

Due to the lag in data capture and reporting by national hospital rating services such as CMS Care Compare and The Leapfrog Group, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg will not be 100 percent free of previous owners’ data until at least 2023, and in some cases 2026.

Added Mr. Moore, “As we outlined in our February 4th presentation to the St. Petersburg City Council, we are committed to addressing the problems we identified upon assuming ownership of the hospital and restoring it to its rightful place as the region’s trusted healthcare facility.”

 

About Bayfront Health St. Petersburg

The 480-bed Bayfront Health St. Petersburg was founded in 1910. It was acquired October 1, 2020 by Orlando Health, a private, not-for-profit healthcare organization with $7.1 billion of assets under management. The hospital’s areas of clinical excellence include heart and vascular, surgical services, rehabilitation services, neurosciences, maternity care and – as home to the only state-accredited Level Two Adult Trauma Center in Pinellas County – emergency services and trauma care.

Bayfront Health St. Petersburg is integral to the 3,200-bed Orlando Health system which serves the southeastern United States through 15 wholly-owned hospitals and emergency departments; rehabilitation services, cancer and heart institutes, imaging and laboratory services, wound care centers, physician offices for adults and pediatrics, skilled nursing facilities, an in-patient behavioral health facility, home healthcare services in partnership with LHC Group, and urgent care centers in partnership with CareSpot Urgent Care. Nearly 4,200 physicians, representing more than 80 medical specialties and subspecialties have privileges across the system, which employs nearly 22,000 team members.

As a statutory teaching healthcare organization, Orlando Health hosts more than 325 residents and fellows including more than 40 who are enrolled at Bayfront Health St. Petersburg’s OB/GYN, Family Medicine, Sports Medicine and Pharmacy programs.

In FY20, Orlando Health served nearly 150,000 inpatients and nearly 3.1 million outpatients. During that same time period, the organization provided approximately $760 million in total value to the communities it serves in the form of charity care, community benefit programs and services, community building activities and more. Additional information can be found at https://www.bayfrontstpete.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.