All posts by Faris Islam
How Cloud Computing Enables Interoperability
CMS has signaled a renewed focus on interoperability, a welcome development for healthcare professionals anxious to more easily exchange insightful data. But there’s still the matter of how well the people involved in various collaborative “Big Data in Healthcare” initiatives operate together.
At some point for most of us in our careers – usually early on – we’ve encountered a project that was initially heralded with a great deal of fanfare, only to ultimately fizzle out after failing to gain enough buy-in. For all the excitement surrounding Big Data projects, many are at similar risk of a premature end if stakeholder concerns aren’t addressed at the outset:
- Who will host the data?
- How will data privacy concerns be handled?
- How have restrictions on data use been addressed?
- Do existing consents allow for data sharing?
- Will the data need to be de-identified? If so, using which methodology?
- Who will be responsible for acquiring, maintaining and distributing it?
- How will the data be protected as it’s routed to its new home?
- How well will it be protected in its new home? Who will have access to it?
For this to work, a neutral ground is usually needed, offered by a trusted third party.
The cloud: breaking down barriers to data exchange
In healthcare, massive amounts of data are not stored in pre-defined, structured tables. Instead, they are often composed of text, notes, numbers, images, formulas, dates, and other facts that are inherently unstructured. In fact, certain kinds of data sources are being created so quickly that there is no time to store it before the need to analyze it.
Savvy healthcare executives see Big Data as an opportunity to break down the paradigm of siloed data. They know that isolated data can be inefficient. Yet even while supporting the vision of Big Data, many healthcare leaders are traditionally reluctant to share data outside their own firewalls. Due to competitive considerations and confidentiality risks, there must be a level of trust in the quality and security of the receiving organization’s health data management systems for the data owner to be willing to share it. No one wants to risk a HIPAA privacy or security violation at the hands of another entity.
‘Dirty’ data can yield hidden treasures
To make an effective Big Data play, data sharing arrangements must be made, data flows defined, data analytics engines and the underlying infrastructure created, and the proper data governance must be agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders. It is at this stage that a trusted third party data warehouse environment is critical for success.
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Prista Corporation is delighted to introduce our newest client and member of the ActionCue Team, Noland Health Services, Inc.
Noland Health Services is a not-for-profit healthcare organization based in Birmingham, Alabama. They specialize in long term acute care hospitals and full-service senior livings and have established programs that meet Alabama’s changing health care needs, serving their community through innovative, high quality health services.
Prista Corporation and HCXperience, Inc. Announce Integration and Distribution Partnership
Austin, Texas — Prista Corporation, developer of the ActionCue Clinical Intelligence platform, and HCXperience, Inc., makers of patient satisfaction/experience software announced this week a partnering of technologies. A move which will, for the first time, allow healthcare organizations to have complete control of their patient care and patient experience information — combining Risk/Quality Management and Performance Improvement functions with patient satisfaction survey information into one easy-to-use software platform.
The planned partnership will integrate HCXperience’s technology, an online survey platform with a wide variety of predefined healthcare-related question sets, such as the several CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers) surveys, and also supports the client’s development of custom surveys covering broader patient and family satisfaction metrics, as well as surveys of employees or other groups, into Prista’s ActionCue Clinical Intelligence application, an industry-leading healthcare risk and quality management software
The resulting technology will be marketed and sold by Prista as ActionCue® Survey Node powered by HCXperience, a collaborative platform for whole-organization management, outstanding data presentation, detailed patient satisfaction/experience survey information and ease-of-use, to support the development of a culture of quality in healthcare organizations.
Both Prista and HCXperience feel the partnership will be invaluable to the healthcare industry highlighting the power and ease of use of HCXperience’s technology, which parallels the design of ActionCue Clinical Intelligence, and furthering the vision of ActionCue’s central role of clinical performance reporting and improvement management for executives, managers and the clinical staff of hospitals of all types — opening the door for tremendous improvements in overall healthcare quality across the country.
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About Prista Corporation. Prista Corporation is an Austin-based company, providing the SaaS-model, online integrated Risk Management application, ActionCue Clinical Intelligence, currently in use in over 140 facilities in 24 states across the US. For additional information, please visit http://pristacorp.com .
Media Contact: Don Jarrell, dbjarrell@pristacorp.com
About HCXperience Inc. HCXperience Inc. is a Pennsylvania based company that provides electronic survey and questionnaire solutions to the healthcare market. Our application HCXP collects and analyzes, as well as provides instant reporting on benchmarked data from satisfaction experience surveys and rounding questionnaires. We are accredited by the national Green Business Bureau and are committed to relevance, accuracy, effectiveness and security of patient data. Additional information can be found at http://hcxperience.com
Media Contact: Wayne Kelly, wayne@hcxpinc.com
Hospital Medicine: Flexible Schedule for Better Patient Care
Source: HealthLeadersMedia.com
By having hospitalists admit a disproportionate number of patients at the start of their work week, they can then taper off admissions in their last 2 days and prevent patients from transitioning among more providers than is necessary.
Want to improve satisfaction ratings among hospitalized patients? Try this: limit the number of hospitalists that a patient sees on any given day.
Rather than considering hospitalists as interchangeable cogs in the healthcare system, this approach allows the hospitalist to establish a relationship with the patient.
“What percentage of patients at your hospital see only one daytime hospitalist?” asked John Nelson, MD, a consultant at Nelson Flores Hospital Medicine Consultants, medical director at the Overlake Hospital Medicine Center in Bellevue, Wash., and co-founder of the Society of Hospital Medicine. Nelson spoke at a Hospital Medicine conference here.
Hospitalists variable schedules often force patients to transition between more providers than is necessary, he said. Having hospitalists work as many consecutive day shifts as possible is one way to avoid multiple hand-offs. Yet, even hospitalists working 7 days on and 7 days off shifts will admit new patients on their last day.
What if hospitals could avoid this dilemma? “What if you could exempt doctors on their last day from taking on the care of any new patients?” Nelson asked.
By having hospitalists admit a disproportionate number of patients at the start of their work week, they can then taper off their admissions in their last 2 days. So, that at noon on the second from last day of their work that provider will stop taking any new patients, he said.
Nelson’s colleague, Eric Howell, MD, immediate past president of the Society for Hospital Medicine, refers to this pattern of front-loading patient assignment as “slam and dwindle.”
“We hand off about six patients, usually because we’ve been able to whittle our list down,” Nelson said. Using this method of assignment, roughly 71% of patients will see the same daytime provider throughout their stay, he said.
In addition to better continuity of care, the incoming provider will pick up a lighter load of patients because on the last day of the outgoing provider’s shift, he or she will have more time to “tee up” patients, writing appropriate off-service notes, talking to families and doing the discharge work for individuals expected to leave the following day.
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Looking for ways to make your Risk/Quality Management job easier?
How would you like your hospital to have a ‘Culture of Quality’?
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5 Tips on surgical attire — what to wear in, or around the operating room
Source: Becker’s Hospital Review
AORN’s New Surgical Attire Recommended Practices: Five Points to Know
The Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses has released an updated version of recommended practices for surgical attire, providing guidance on what to wear in or around an operating room. An article from the AORN Journal detailed some of the practices outlined below:
- New guidelines cite evidence on the use of antimicrobial fabrics and say using fabric with that technology in scrubs could help protect patients from surgical site infections.
- Jewelry like earrings, watches and rings that cannot be confined in scrubs should not be worn in semi-restricted or restricted areas, as those items can increase bacterial counts on the skin
- Personal items like briefcases, backpacks and electronic devices should be kept off the floor and cleaned with a disinfectant before and after being brought into a perioperative setting
- Cover apparel like lab coats that are worn over scrubs should be single-use or, if reusable, should be cleaned in a health care-accredited facility after each use
- Any apparel worn in a perioperative setting should be cleaned in a health care-accredited laundry facility, as evidence suggests scrubs cleaned in a home setting have a risk for carrying pathogenic organisms.
…Story Continued On Original Site
Looking for ways to make your Risk/Quality Management job easier?
How would you like your hospital to have a ‘Culture of Quality’?
Save up to 30% on your RM/QI & PI programs.