The Joint Commission and Kaiser Permanente recently announced Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG) as the winner of the 2024 Bernard J. Tyson National Award for Excellence in Pursuit of Healthcare Equity.
The award, established in honor of late Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO Bernard J. Tyson, honors a healthcare organization for its efforts that achieved a measurable, sustained reduction in one or more healthcare disparities.
The award recognizes ZSFG, a safety net hospital and San Francisco’s only Level 1 trauma center, for its achievements under the initiative Reducing Racial Disparities for African American Patients with Heart Failure. The improvement team’s efforts significantly improved care for all patients with heart failure at ZSFG.
Clinicians at ZSFG identified heart failure as a leading cause of hospitalization for Black/African American patients. Additionally, many heart failure patients who were readmitted also had co-occurring substance use disorders.
ZSFG implemented two primary interventions:
• To better manage care for patients with heart failure, ZSFG created an artificial intelligence-based decision support tool and integrated it into the EHR at the point of care to provide patient-specific recommendations about medical and social care needs. They also created AI-enabled population health management tools to proactively identify and manage the highest-risk patients.
• To address social and behavioral health needs, ZSFG created an addiction medicine/cardiology co-management clinic, allowing clinicians in primary care, cardiology, social medicine, addiction medicine, and palliative care to collaborate in caring for patients with heart failure who had complex needs at highest risk of poor outcomes.
These efforts achieved impressive results that reduced healthcare disparities and improved outcomes for ZSFG’s patients with heart failure:
• Closed the 5.4% gap in the readmission rate between Black/African American patients with heart failure and the general heart failure population between 2018 (baseline) and 2022.
• Decreased the 30-day readmission rate for all patients with heart failure from 33% to 20%.
The Tyson Award selection panel commends ZSFG’s work, affirming its approach to addressing broad, system-level structural changes, educating staff, and reducing silos among specialists.
“Congratulations to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center for its exceptional efforts to identify and address healthcare disparities,” said Jonathan B. Perlin, M.D., Ph.D., president and chief executive officer, The Joint Commission and Joint Commission International, in a statement. “Healthcare disparities remain a critical patient safety issue, and patients need the healthcare industry to prioritize them to build a world in which all people always experience the safest, highest quality and most equitable healthcare across all settings.”
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