Three Reporting Initiatives That'll Inspire

Nadine Thibeh and Oi Hua Lee

In healthcare, reporting is essential for tracking numerous events and statuses, from a patient’s medical history to a hospital’s inventory. Quality improvement reporting is an integral and necessary component to determining what changes healthcare organizations can make to enhance patient safety and experiences, improve outcomes, optimize systems and develop smoother processes. So, we thought we’d share with you three reporting initiatives that have inspired us, in hopes that it will do the same for you to help take patient safety and quality of care to the next level.

1. Bridging the gap with benchmarks
Within any healthcare organization, benchmarking is often used to determine hospital-to-hospital or department-to-department success. This can be done by comparing specific facets of the hospital environment, such as falls and nosocomial infections, against other hospitals or between departments. One of RLDatix' clients, CHART, uses RL6:Risk to benchmark its member-hospitals against each other to gain a deeper understanding of their specific situation. Prior to RL6, CHART had repeated problems with reporting where reports were often misplaced and it took hours to analyze trends and data, and monitor events. This congestion in reporting translated into receiving reports from member-hospitals long after the data was useful. Using RL software helps CHART enhance its reporting capabilities by being able to compare data amongst other hospitals. Through benchmarking, CHART identified contributing safety factors and developed potential solutions to improve patient safety for CHART and its members.

2. Moving from a paper-based to real-time data
As technology develops, hospitals are updating and Rising Above the Paper-Based System. Reporting results has thus become quicker, leading to real-time data and, consequently, real-time trends. The shift towards real-time information acquisition has allowed for prioritizing actions taken in the hospital. One of RLDatix' clients, Ministry Health Care, is a prime example of receiving real-time trends through reporting. Ministry Health Care uses RL6:Risk to seek common themes and issues its required to report to outside regulatory agencies. RL6 allows the hospital to directly email reports and graphs from the software to anyone in the system. Not only does this method save the team time each month, it lets them see real-time trends and look back at them for any recent errors—a key success of the hospital’s reporting. Ministry Health Care reallocated time spent on unnecessary paperwork to doing what it’s passionate about: improving patient safety reporting while using time effectively.

Read the full case study: Rising about the Paper-Based System

3. Driving accuracy with improved data
Healthcare quality staff are constantly on the hunt for areas of improvement. Vanderbilt Medical Center (VMC) uses RL6:Risk reports to help its risk management staff identify crucial areas that require improvement, such as medication errors. Through reporting, VMC was able to not only pinpoint areas for improvement, but also improve organizational and departmental involvement in tracking and trending reports. For instance, VMC uses RL6 to report near miss incidents involving potential equipment malfunctions and drug reactions. The most-frequent error became an organizational goal to reduce the level of that error and the data in the report gave VMC’s risk managers the necessary information to make the right improvement steps. Through reporting, VMC proactively enlisted measures to avoid such future events and identified errors to ensure the accuracy of their improvements.

Read the full case study: In Pursuit of the Fast, Simple Form

It goes without saying that reporting plays a significant and vital role to making improvements within hospitals and other healthcare facilities. We hope that we’ve been able to inspire you with some risk management initiatives that you can take back to your own organization. Because you know as well as we do that something as simple as reporting in hospitals can make a world of difference when it comes to safety in healthcare.

For more ideas, download our ebook: Strategies to Boost Event Reporting

 

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