Employee Incident and Injury Reports: Full Risk Integration For Safer Healthcare

How Munson Healthcare centralized their data with event reporting

By integrating an Employee Incident and Injury report into RL6:Risk software by RLDatix, Munson Healthcare has reaped the benefits of transparency, automation, and streamlined centralized data while standardizing the event reporting process across the enterprise.

Amanda Rommell at Munson Healthcare

Written by Amanda Rommell, a Senior System Specialist at Munson Healthcare

 

ABOUT MUNSON HEALTHCARE

Munson Healthcare, northern Michigan’s largest and leading healthcare system, has always been committed to high quality and safety. Their hospitals are repeatedly recognized nationally for outstanding patient care.

Munson Healthcare’s hospitals have been recognized by both The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) and the Leapfrog Group for their performance and dedication to patient care. The CMS issues an annual rating for 4,000 of the nation's hospitals based on 57 quality measures across seven performance areas. All Munson Healthcare's hospitals received either a 5-star or 4-star ratings. The Leapfrog Group is an independent, national not-for-profit organization which measures and publicly reports hospital performance through the annual Leapfrog Hospital Survey for which Munson Healthcare’s hospitals have each been Graded A.


INTEGRATING RLDATIX FOR SAFER CARE

Munson Healthcare focuses on high-quality care for patients and their families.

How does Munson Healthcare ensure their health care system, doctors, nurses, technicians, and staff are focused on providing high-quality care and creating a safe environment for patients and their families? With a little help from RL6:Risk software.

Prior to 2011, Munson Healthcare manually tracked employee risk events via phone and paper. This process was cumbersome, inefficient and prone to errors and missed events. With an increase in risk events, and the implementation of RL6:Risk software, the organization moved their Employee Incident and Injury reports into the RL system so as to create a one-stop shop for any and all safety events at a Munson Healthcare hospital.


THE NEED FOR IMPROVED NOTIFICATIONS AND WORKFLOWS

Employees quickly adapted to this new electronic reporting system as the usage of the risk event reporting in RL6:Risk software rose sharply. It quickly became apparent that an improved notification process was required. Immediate notifications were deemed essential as staff in the area of work injury and employee health are often away from their desks, attending appointments and responding to injuries. A multidisciplinary team formed to be responsible for brainstorming and testing this vital notification solution, which included members of the Telecommunications, Switchboard, Information Systems, Employee Health, Work Injury, and Human Resources teams.

The team discovered that the pagers carried by all healthcare personnel each had a unique email address associated with them, which meant a watchdog alert could actually fire a page. They built these pagers into the RLDatix software as unique users and tested how alerts would interact with them. They were excited to discover that they worked just the same as a human user profile works within the system. This was a big win for Munson Healthcare’s employee injury team!

 

 

The principles of Lean Management were then utilized to create a value stream flow for who should get notified, and the process that each file would undergo. It was identified that the team didn’t actually need immediate notification for all injury reports, but rather just those where the employee needed prompt medical attention or where they were unsure if they needed immediate attention. The employees that simply wanted to report a near-miss or “wait and see” injury could go through a normal routing process, where all appropriate parties are notified the next morning. In order to differentiate between these two types of events, Munson Healthcare created a field that is mandatory for all, called “Treatment Needed”, where a “Yes” or “Unknown” response triggers their immediate notification process, and a “No” response simply puts the file into the regular notification process.

By integrating their Employee Incident and Injury reports into RL6:Risk risk software, Munson Healthcare has reaped the benefits of transparency, automation, and streamlined centralized data while standardizing the event reporting process across the enterprise. They now have access to better employee injury data, ensuring they maintain their standard of excellence and commitment to high quality and workplace safety.

Interested in learning how other organizations are using the RLDatix software to streamline their workflows and achieve results? Read Ochsner Health System’s story on Enhancing workflows with electronic clinical surveillance software.

How did you improve your organizational workflow? Post on the HUB with your suggestions and join the conversation!

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