Streamlining Safer Care Through Patient Safety & Policy Data Integration

Every day, healthcare professionals make countless decisions on behalf of their patients. From choosing the right medications to administering treatments, these decisions must be made quickly and accurately to deliver safer outcomes. For healthcare professionals to make the best decisions possible, they need access to the most accurate and up-to-date information.

So, how can we equip them to carry out this important work in a safer, more efficient way?

Integrating Patient Safety Data with Policy Data

In recent years, there’s been a growing focus on integrating patient safety data with policy data to help healthcare administrators and frontline staff more easily identify potential risk factors that could be mitigated by policy changes. Doing so also allows for early detection of hot-spot policies and gives collaborative visibility to the latest information, so risk and policy teams can seamlessly intervene and address future harm.

By integrating patient safety data with policy data, hospitals can create a more efficient and overall safer environment for both patients and care teams alike.

From High Quality Policies to High Quality Healthcare

Preventable harm like medication errors, falls, and wrong-side-wrong-patient surgeries are all too common in healthcare organizations. But what many don't realize is that these issues can often be traced back to problems with policies and procedures. Whether it’s an outdated policy that guides staff to perform obsolete steps, a missing policy that has staff act without a standard practice in place, or a conflicting policy that leaves staff without a clear way to proceed, these can all contribute to adverse events, complaints, infections, and claims within an organization.

By enabling quality and risk departments to capture and report factors contributing to patient harm or near-miss events and track, and then connect them against policy data in real time, you can draw a clear line to show how high-quality policies can lead to higher quality healthcare. It also automatically alerts policy owners to necessary policy reviews, helping them more quickly identify areas for improvement and make changes to reduce future risk.  

Overall, integrating policy into your risk mitigation plan offers quality teams a more efficient way to ensure patient safety, reduce risk, and save on valuable resources.

An Integrated Solution for Delivering Safer Care

Policy management tools are key to delivering safer care rooted in integrated data. Document control and regulatory compliance are difficult for any health system to maintain manually. Providing policy managers with a simple, searchable, and scalable enterprise policy management solution allows staff to collaboratively manage, maintain and provide governance over your policy library.

Using an integrated approach, you can ensure that all policies are centrally located, consistent and easy to understand. You can also view real-time tracking of who has read each policy, when they last read it, and any edits made, ensuring all staff are up to date on the latest changes.

It also adds a valuable level of connectivity to compliance operations. The power of connecting evidence-based requirements from accreditors, equipment manufacturers and regulators to everyday processes and policies empowers you to maintain the higher quality of care and accreditation standards that are critical to providing safer care.

The benefits of integration help to bring us one step closer to our ultimate shared goal of zero harm in patient care.

The benefits of data integration help to bring us one step closer to our ultimate shared goal of zero harm in patient care.

A Streamlined Approach to Quality and Risk Management

Policies are a living and breathing part of healthcare organizations, which means they will require regular review to best support patients and staff members. By sharing data across quality, risk and policy departments, health systems will be uniquely positioned to break down internal silos and create a safer environment with increased patient safety reporting and higher quality policies and procedures.

RLDatix streamlines patient safety processes for event reporting, event analysis, feedback, and claims into an easy-to-use platform, helping policy managers stay informed of opportunities to develop or enhance policies that will better support staff, and ultimately helps quality and risk managers ensure patients receive the best and safest care possible.

That’s a win for the entire healthcare system. 

Connect with us to learn how integrating your risk management and policy management solutions will enable you to better identify and adjust high-risk policies and provide safer patient care.