CALNOC's Brown Honored for Quality Contributions

PR Log (Press Release) – Nov 03, 2009 – Diane Storer Brown Recognized for Contributions to Health Care Quality

November 3, 2009 (Sacramento, CA) – Diane Storer Brown, PhD, RN, CPHQ, FNAHQ, FAAN, was honored for contributions to improving healthcare quality by the National Association of Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) at its 34th annual educational conference in Dallas, Tex., September 13–16, 2009. More than 800 quality professionals attended the conference to gain skills to advance improvement in healthcare quality and outcomes.
Brown is co-principal investigator for CALNOC (the Collaborative Alliance for Nursing Outcomes) and has been part of the CALNOC research team since its inception in 1996. She is currently the Clinical Practice Leader for Hospital Accreditation Programs, at Kaiser Permanente Northern California Region in Oakland, CA. She is a Fellow of the NAHQ as well as the American Academy of Nursing.
One of five honorees, Brown earned the Journal of Healthcare Quality (JHQ) Golden Pen Award for her role as primary author of “Quartile Dashboards: Translating Large Data Sets into Performance Improvement Priorities” in the November/December 2008 issue of JHQ. Brown’s CALNOC co-authors included Carolyn Aydin, PhD, senior research scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center/Burns & Allen Research Institute in Los Angeles and Nancy Donaldson DNSc, RN, FAAN, CALNOC co-principal investigator and clinical professor and the director for the Center for Nursing Research and Innovation at the University of California San Francisco School Of Nursing. The award recognizes NAHQ members who have contributed to the improvement of the healthcare quality profession through published articles.
“The data we collect and synthesize for member hospitals is translated into quality improvement at the point of care, leading to higher quality care,” Brown said. “It’s a winning combination, and I am honored to be recognized by NAHQ for the work CALNOC is doing.”
“We are very proud of Dr. Brown’s award and the contribution our article makes to the quality improvement literature,” Donaldson said. “To understand an individual facility, service, or patient care unit’s comparative performance from within large data sets, prioritization and focused data presentation are needed. This article presented a methodology for translating data from large data sets into dashboards for setting performance improvement priorities, in a simple way that takes advantage of tools readily available and easily used by support staff. Through its benchmarking and dashboard capabilities, CALNOC provides tools for clinical and quality professionals to set performance targets, thresholds and benchmarks which can then be turned into powerful visual tools to quickly inform frontline staff, operational leaders, and governing bodies on prioritized metrics.

CALNOC advances global patient care safety, outcomes and performance measurement efforts by leveraging a dynamic nursing outcomes database and reporting system; providing actionable data to guide decision making, performance improvement and public policy; conducting research to optimize patient care excellence; and building leadership expertise in the use of practice-based evidence. CALNOC, a national and international enterprise, includes hospitals representing 55 percent of licensed beds in California. For more information, go to https://www.calnoc.org.

Contact Patricia McFarland, MS, RN, FAAN
CALNOC Executive Director
(916) 779-6949
Or patricia@acnl.org