How Excellent Patient Care Saves Costs

Patient Safety is defined as “the absence of preventable harm to a patient and reduction of risk of unnecessary harm associated with health care to an acceptable minimum.”  Every hospital in America has a stated mission to prioritize Patient Safety above all else.  “First, do no harm” is the most fundamental principle of any health care service.  Every healthcare organization says it, but are they really doing everything they can to prioritize patient safety?

The first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one.  But what if you aren’t aware that you have a problem?  Especially in the Critical Access and Community Hospital space, where staff is stretched to non-optimal lengths, how can a facility, not only stay on top of patient safety, but take the time necessary to rigorously evaluate processes and policies to improve their quality of care?

Beyond the moral and ethical obligation to provide the best health care possible, there are clear financial benefits, although often unrecognized, unknown, or undervalued, to doing no harm.  When was the last time you truly evaluated your facilities process of minimizing risk events, and optimizing quality outcomes? Could it be improved upon? Can it make your facility more profitable? The answer is a resounding yes.

Look at your patient fall data to see how much you’ve paid for Cost of Harm falls last year – what else could your hospital have used that money for? Next time you need to tighten your budget, remember cost cuts don’t just come from lowering staffing or standards. You can also save by minimizing how much quality and risk incidents are costing your hospital.

We’ve found this is true amongst our customers. Using ActionCue© CI’s Performance Improvement Plans and the guidance of our Implementation & Support team, one of our customer hospitals reduced falls at their facility by 25% over three years. Based on the Center of Disease Dynamic’s Cost of Harm figures, this saved them almost a million dollars in additional costs.

Another hospital saved more than a million dollars over three years as their CLASBI cases reduced by almost 47%. A third hospital saved more than $80,000 by cutting their rate of VAP cases by 66% in three years of using ActionCue CI.

Improving the quality of care, through proactively tracking and tackling risk and quality incidents can lead to significant savings from the cost of harm avoided – money that can fund additional staff, equipment upgrades and other improvements.

This positive cycle can multiply – every dollar saved by avoiding a Cost of Harm event can be spent on further eliminating Cost of Harm events, leading to more savings from the cost of harm avoided. As the cycle continues, avoidable costs decrease while the quality of care – and your reputation – increases.

This article first appeared in the March 2024 edition of Marketplace, the monthly newsletter of TORCH Management Services, Inc.

Prista Corporation and Idaho Hospital Association Partner to Promote Advanced Clinical Intelligence Software in Idaho

Why the Healthcare Quadruple Aim Hasn’t (Yet) Hit the Bullseye

In 2014, the Triple Aim proposed by IHI in 2007 became the Quadruple Aim. This transition occurred because the objectives of the Triple Aim – better patient experiences, better population health, and lower costs – had been pursued mainly with what may have been an ill-conceived and dangerous assumption. Specifically, the dedication of clinicians and providers was assumed to be an inexhaustible resource of human initiative, technical expertise, and plain old labor.

This assumption was dangerous because significant driving forces in healthcare, such as administrators, investors, regulators, and vendors within the industry, held this assumption to be true. This view led to initiatives, compliance requirements, and work demands that frequently did not align strongly with those dedicated healthcare professionals’ motivations and goals yet asked more and more of them.

Finally, healthcare team well-being was added to create the vital concept of the Quadruple Aim. How much progress has been made in the eight years since?

Many have reported real progress on parts of the Quadruple Aim. Still, several things stand out. First, gains in one of the Aims sometimes come at a cost, even to the point of backsliding, in others. If the true goal is to optimize for all four Aims, why is this acceptable? Second, some efforts become parochial and limited in focus as though they are driven by more competitive or “better” thinking than the unified way of thinking that is required to serve the four aims. Third, some analysts consider operational efficiency a frequent enabler of competing goals, but honestly, efficiency has never been a core strength or serious pursuit in healthcare. While efficiency is usually the key to serving these competing goals, it may address the fourth Aim, the team’s well-being, the most. And that is why it becomes such a breakthrough for the Quadruple Aim because, with significant weakness in the fourth Aim, the other three are rarely, if ever, met.

Here is a simple but essential chain of thought. Performance Improvement, as the critical path toward the Quadruple Aim, needs to be deftly integrated into all the processes used to manage clinical care. Endless speeches, white papers, classes, and slogans are not enough to accomplish this. Instead, genuinely re-engineering the workflows and tools used is required. Contrary to this requirement, the typical approach to PI is to approach it as a distinct function governed by conceptual methodologies, which are only blueprints for manual human work. Any means of technical facilitation is usually homegrown, lacking standardization and any real efficiency, and so are pinpoint solutions serving only separate tasks in the process chain without real integration or collective advantage. In Enhancing healthcare efficiency to achieve the Quadruple Aim: an exploratory study published in BMC Research Notes, Bengt B. Arnetz et al. said, “To our knowledge, no previous intervention has primarily targeted efficiency for quality improvement.”

An advanced PI software workbench designed with the real goals in mind, not just the separate objectives’ tasks, and strong UI/UX (user interface and user experience) that is directly connected to the processes for tracking, analyzing, and investigating quality metrics and safety event reports, represents a significant and vital innovation that can have tremendous impacts on efficiency for the overall effort. It is certainly worth an exploratory look and, frankly, serious consideration, but many will not take that next step because it is very different from what they have “always done.” So maybe it’s time for a real break out to get to the Quadruple Aim.

CIHQ Interviews Prista Founders

Prista Corporation’s ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence is a new Endorsed Partner by Texas’s TORCH Management Services, Inc. (TMSI)

Prista Corporation, maker of ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence, a software platform for healthcare quality-safety and performance improvement is now an Endorsed Partner of TMSI, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals (TORCH).

Prista Corporation, an industry leader in clinical intelligence software for healthcare quality-safety and performance improvement, is proud to announce their latest endorsement – that of TORCH Management Services, Inc.

“Over the past 12 years, Prista has successfully deployed ActionCue CI to many hospitals in 33 states – including 25 in Texas alone. Gaining this important endorsement from TMSI further validates the key role ActionCue CI plays in facilitating continuous performance improvement in patient care and safety by providing actionable insights in real-time to healthcare leaders and their staffs. We look forward to working with TMSI/TORCH members to bring ActionCue CI to bear on solving their challenges,” said Don Jarrell, President of Prista Corporation.

“TMSI is pleased to welcome Prista Corporation as an Endorsed Partner,” said Vicki Pascasio, FACHE, President of TMSI.  Ms. Pascasio continued, “This endorsement recognizes that Prista’s ActionCue CI platform can assist our TORCH member hospitals in achieving their goals while adhering to excellent standards.  Like all our Endorsed Partners, Prista has gone through a thorough vetting process.”

About Prista Corporation: Prista’s mission is to help healthcare providers create and sustain a “Culture of Quality” in their organizations. In other words, an environment that drives continuous performance improvement in patient care and safety. Prista does this by developing innovative, intuitive, easy-to-use software that goes beyond traditional reporting to provide actionable insights in real-time. With Prista’s ActionCue CI platform, information is more readily available, more meaningful, and more actionably insightful for healthcare executives, managers, and clinical staff.

About TMSI: TORCH Management Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals (TORCH) created for the purpose of having an organization that could engage with services on behalf of the TORCH membership.  TMSI provides value-added services to rural healthcare organizations, thereby enhancing their opportunities for success.

About TORCH: The Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals envisions rural Texas as having access to the highest quality health care.  To accomplish this, TORCH’s mission is to be the voice and principal advocate for rural and community hospitals in Texas and to provide leadership in addressing the special needs and issues of these hospitals. For more information, visit torchnet.org.