Cristine Neff is a Safety & Quality Improvement Coordinator at Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital, an affiliate of Memorial Health System. She is also the administrator for the RL software.
Memorial Health System has worked very diligently to create a unified comprehensive training program for all RL software users. The program is divided up into frontline staff education, file manager education, and basic admin user education (which we call Super Users). Each affiliate hospital has one identified Super User.
Frontline staff receive their initial education during their new employee onboarding session. We take them into the system, provide a high-level tutorial, discuss what types of events can and should be submitted. Then, we show them what it looks like to submit an event. We also listen to manager feedback. So if a manager is seeing trends and key issues that frontline staff are struggling with, we can push out an FAQ in our company’s memo. The system is very self-intuitive for frontline staff so we try and keep it as simple as possible.
File Managers get a more-in depth training, in a classroom setting with hands-on experience. We keep the training small (less than 10 people to a class) so that everyone has time to chime in as we go along and ask questions. First, a demo of the system is provided. We start out by showing what it looks like for frontline staff to submit an event. That way, if their employees have questions, or if they need to submit an event themselves, they are supplied with the tools they need to answer any questions. Then, once the file is submitted, we take them in through what it looks like once they receive a submitted event for their area of responsibility and go over the file manager responsibilities in great detail.
So, okay, you’ve received your first event for your area, now what?
We discuss how file managers will be alerted to a new file, how to locate and open the event, and then take them in through managing the file from beginning to completion. In this portion, I point out all file manager features, such as how you find out who all was alerted to a specific event (alerts), how to assign someone access into the event (tasks), if something has been updated in the file, how to find out what was changed and who changed it (audit feature). We also discuss redacting personal information from the file in order to protect PHI, especially with most events being reported to our Patient Safety Organization.
After the demo has occurred, I’ve created a hands-on training session that the students participate in. Each student gets a step-by-step training packet that they work through individually. We are there to answer any questions that they might have as they work through the exercise. Students log in to the training environment, practice submitting an event, manage the event from beginning to end, and practice key features of the system, such as creating and sending tasks.
After the in class training session is over, file managers receive a welcome packet via email that includes who to contact if they need any assistance, a copy of the hands-on training and education that they just received, file manager tips & tricks, FAQ’s, severity level definitions, and file manager expectations. Basically a nice, handy, packet of information that they can quickly reference when they start receiving events.
I also designed a Super User Role (Basic Admin) program that was created for each affiliated hospital in order to optimize and standardize training across our health system. Each Super User is responsible for managing all user-specific tasks for their facility, such as identifying and setting up new users, maintenance of users, providing file manager training to those individuals, and troubleshooting all issues. In order to get the Super Users capable of handling the tasks, they first go through the file manager training themselves. We also come together as a health system on a quarterly basis to optimize the program, identify any training needs, and discuss trends, as well as address any issues that we are seeing.
We want everyone to be able to take these events and use them as a learning opportunity so I really focus on showing file managers how to redact information, such as who submitted the file, patient, staff, and physician names, etc., so they can print out or save the document to take to a staff meeting to discuss the learning opportunity. I think that is a very important piece in not only creating a culture of safety, but in showing staff that we are paying attention, listening to their concerns, and ensuring the hospital is a safe haven for our patients.