NICU Key Performance Indicators

Ochsner Lafayette General’s Level III NICU is committed to improving the quality and safety of medical care for newborn infants and their families through our voluntary affiliation with the Vermont Oxford Network.

What are VON’s Key Performance Indicators?

The Vermont Oxford Network (VON) is one of the largest neonatal performance databases in existence, with over 950 participating Neonatal Intensive Care Units around the world. They collect detailed information on newborn intensive care unit (NICU) performance and provide a benchmark for quality patient care. These are their Key Performance Indicators that allow participating NICU’s to see how their performance compares to the Network performance as a whole. In general, the Key Performance Indicators represent complications of prematurity, and as such, the lower the rates of these complications, the better the care is likely to be.

Significant measurable improvements have been made since 2006, when orchestrated efforts were made to improve the approach to neonatal care in Ochsner Lafayette General Medical Center's NICU. All of the Key Performance Indicators have consistently improved to the point where we now compare extremely favorably to all NICU’s in the Vermont Oxford Network’s database, and in many areas we are now consistently better than the majority of neonatal intensive care units in Louisiana, the United States, and around the world.

The people who choose to deliver their babies at Ochsner Lafayette General Medical Center, as well as the physicians who refer patients to us deserve to have access to objective data regarding the quality of work we do, and it is in this forum that we plan to provide this information. Dr. Cortez would be happy to discuss our outcomes, the Vermont Oxford Network, and the measures we took to achieve our success with any interested party, and will update our outcome statistics real-time here on Ochsner Lafayette General Medical Center's website (please note that Network data as well as the Louisiana Group data lag behind Ochsner Lafayette General Medical Center's data by one year).

Please note that the red Vermont Oxford Network line varies little because there are 50,000 – 60,000 babies a year in their denominator so it would take quite an event to make a significant change in their aggregate data; the green All Louisiana NICUs line varies more since they have several thousands of babies a year in their denominator; the blue Ochsner Lafayette General Medical Center NICU line varies greatly because we only have 40-50 babies a year in our denominator, so one patient can make a significant change in that year’s statistic — this is why we have the black Ochsner Lafayette General Medical Center Trend Line in place, which smooths out that line and makes it easier to compare our performance with that of the other groups.