Quality, Safety, & High Reliability

Siloed clinical quality and patient safety processes, operations, and structures is a deep-rooted challenge many healthcare leaders have inherited. Lack of alignment and integration creates disconnection between the equity-informed care that organizations want to deliver consistently and the reality of their environments. It’s overwhelming, inefficient, and increasingly costly and ineffective.

We work with clients to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in alignment with nationally recognized HRO models, across both clinical and non-clinical operations. Our comprehensive assessment is conducted through the lens of four dimensions—structure, process, people, and resources—and results in a practical, achievable high reliability roadmap, a “true north” that informs organizational goals and priorities. Our solutions include strategies across operating model, governance and accountability, leading practice process implementation, leadership and training, data and analytics, and more.

Equity is embedded throughout our high reliability framework. Some organizations may have begun their high reliability journey but aspire to integrate equity more comprehensively. We partner to align and integrate equity into quality, safety, and operations as the primary goal. Our assessment and roadmap would include exploring overall structure, processes, people and resources to understand where equity work is embedded and where there are gaps. Specific solution examples include assessing how demographic information is collected and used at the patient level and in aggregate, looking at regulatory compliance, reviewing equity measures related to ratings and ranking systems, and optimizing data processes to ensure accuracy and improve performance.

While our definition of high reliability captures all that is part of an equitable, effective, safe, resilient system, patient safety is clearly a critical component to the equation. Our patient safety track centers on improving processes related to identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities that could lead to patient harm. Solutions may center on patient safety organizational structures and human resources, governance, committee structures, best practices around the peer review process, credentialing and privileging, ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE), focused professional practice evaluation (FPPE), and culture and safety.

Health systems today are facing a growing disconnect: clinical care has become more complex, but the administrative data used to measure performance, reimbursement, and quality often fails to fully reflect that reality. We help close that gap by providing a comprehensive assessment of how clinical outcomes are captured and transformed into administrative data across clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and coding functions. Moving beyond traditional CDI focused on MS-DRG Medicare populations, we advance a “coding for quality” approach that ensures data accuracy across all patients, payers, and care settings. This enables organizations to capture appropriate revenue while strengthening risk adjustment and quality reporting, so that administrative data more accurately reflects true patient acuity, clinical complexity, and outcomes. 

Healthcare organizations face growing complexity, with competing priorities that can fragment focus and result in redundant efforts. Meanwhile, hospital boards are increasingly holding leadership accountable for national ratings and rankings (CMS Star Ratings, Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, US News & World Report, Vizient Quality and Accountability Study, etc.), which are driven by hundreds of metrics with varying definitions and timelines. Leading health systems drive clinical care improvement through an integrated, enterprise-wide approach that aligns quality, safety, operations, and financial performance. Chartis helps clients improve ratings and rankings by identifying the most impactful metrics, prioritizing recommendations, and executing a targeted improvement roadmap. Our team combines deep expertise, advanced analytics, and proven methodologies to deliver sustainable performance gains, stronger ratings outcomes, and ultimately, better patient care.