Category Archives for Healthcare Innovation

The Strategic Benefit of Genuine Innovation

Part 4 of 4  in a series about putting genuine innovation to work

While ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence has consistently demonstrated immediate to short-term benefits in the hospitals using it, a natural resistance to change can still keep hospital leaders from contemplating implementation. There are strategic benefits connected to ActionCue that should easily tip the scale in favor of taking action to deploy the system.

• The change from periodic to real-time access to insight. The management and communication process for improving patient care quality and safety is redefined simply by using the ActionCue application. No more high-stress preparation and review of voluminous data on a periodic schedule is required to gain the insight needed to drive quality and safety.  With ActionCue, whenever a question or management need arises, real-time insight is just a few clicks away.  The strategic significance is in the shift to continuous, collaborative, on-demand insight, enabling the whole clinical and management team to finally accomplish what they have been striving for.
• ActionCue allows executive focus to expand to other aims. Care quality and safety for patients are fundamental to all of the clinical, operational and financial objectives of a hospital or group. ActionCue is a key component in managing and improving these two aspects of the operation, resulting in more effectiveness and efficiency on an ongoing basis. With this important portion of operations set on track, the other aims of the executive team can receive more attention.
• The staff becomes a full-time learning organization. ActionCue is a feedback vehicle that greatly impacts organizational dynamics and the staff’s motivation to learn. The trending of measures and the facts and circumstances of events and improvement activities are not simply “shipped out” for others to study, but are made readily available and extremely easy to comprehend, allowing informed decisions and actions.
• Best practices are built in to the system. Great things have been done in healthcare by applying various quality improvement methodologies. However, most of these require involved and sometimes quite costly education of the staff. The structure, design and workflows of ActionCue embody the fundamental elements that are common to all the leading quality improvement methodologies; the users therefore use best practices just by using the application.  This saves a lot of time on an immediate and ongoing basis and eliminates a significant portion of an organization’s annual training expense to keep staff up to speed on a special methodology.
• The organization has an “automatic” culture of quality. It is not uncommon for hospital leaders to roll out big initiatives focused on creating a culture of quality. It is also not uncommon for such initiatives to fade over time, with no lasting effect. ActionCue, with its incorporated quality improvement methodology, its efficiency and ease-of-use, and its feedback on organizational performance, naturally and automatically facilitates a shift toward the sought-after culture. Management’s very apparent involvement in improvement efforts through ActionCue further sustains and strengthens this cultural shift.
• ActionCue achieves good return on investment. On the whole, ActionCue Clinical Intelligence pays for itself several times over. The system provides help on both sides of the Pay for Performance system. The application has a proven track record in reducing the occurrence of complications and adverse incidents and their associated costs, for which hospitals are not reimbursed. In this longer-term view, the performance metrics presented via ActionCue are improved through the learning it enables. Overall performance improvement reduces the likelihood of reimbursement penalties for poor clinical performance – and our clients’ experience has documented that.  The use of ActionCue has even lowered the incidental and systematic concerns about litigation which hospitals do monetize, including lowered insurance premiums.

Since ActionCue application went to market in 2011, it has maintained 100% customer retention. With implementation of ActionCue and the most attentive, responsive and experienced customer support team in the industry (they’re all seasoned nurses), you may find a place that you, too, will never want to leave.

Part 1: Genuine Innovation

Part 2: Key Innovations

Part 3: Turning Innovation into Benefits

Turning Innovation Into Benefits

Part 3 of 4 in a series about putting genuine innovation to work

Committed to genuine innovation and applying key innovations, ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence offers a range of benefits that become apparent immediately or shortly after implementation. According to users:

• ActionCue is up and running very quickly. Unlike the majority of solutions with the same operational breadth, ActionCue is ready to begin the implementation process in about 48 hours.  In several of our customer sites, users jumped in and created Event Reports – without any training – in the first few days.  Customers are using the application productively and obtaining reports within 30 days and are generally fully up to speed in 60 days.
• There are big productivity changes. Clinical managers in Quality, Safety, Nursing, Performance Improvement and other roles are able to refocus 20 to 30 percent of their work week, time that had been spent on less efficient tasks, onto more productive things. The ActionCue application handles so much of the work that used to be done by humans: Calculating and moving data; automatically preparing reports; making additions and modification to performance measures from regulatory and academic authorities; and enabling the management and flow of information.
• Humans can do what they do best. With ActionCue doing what software does best, time can be spent by staff on reviewing and thinking about the accumulated knowledge presented by the application. This really moves the needle on quality and safety as the organization learns through collaboration and communication facilitated by ActionCue.
• A lot of time is saved during managerial and executive review. ActionCue presents actionable insight rather than grids of numbers. This leads to shorter meetings of Quality Council, Medical Staff and Governing Board because attendees can quickly see exactly what the application presents as critically performing measures as well as what is being done to improve through performance improvement action plans.

The benefits facilitated by the key innovations in ActionCue show up quickly, and perhaps more important, they don’t fade away. These immediate benefits also set the stage for significant longer-term strategic benefits that in turn help make a big and permanent change to quality, safety and performance improvement.

Part 1: Genuine Innovations

Part 2: The key innovations that make ActionCue effective, efficient and easy.

Part 4: The Strategic Benefit of Genuine Innovation

Key Innovations for Quality, Safety and Performance Improvement

Part 2 of 4 in a series about putting genuine innovation to work

Hospitals can see benefits from genuine innovation with evolved processes that maintain the underlying process principles.

ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence offers these benefits through key innovations:

• ActionCue gives answers instead of more work. Unlike typical basic storage/retrieval systems that require users to submit queries, “do the math” and construct reports, ActionCue has the answers that quality, safety, and Performance Improvement teams need. The definition, format, and calculations of over a thousand authority-defined performance measures are built into the application, selectable through a couple of mouse clicks.
• ActionCue eliminates the need for periodic report generation and scheduled review meetings. This is a continuously-available information system, providing easy access and clear presentation of actionable, real-time insight. The big picture of all clinical performance measures, adverse event investigations and the staff’s performance improvement efforts are all linked together and referenceable at any time.

“ActionCue is information at your fingertips.”   – Tracy Lilie, Director of Health Information Management

• ActionCue functionally integrates Quality Management, Event Reporting and Investigation and Performance Improvement. The system follows the natural working and thinking processes of clinical staff and leaders.  Whatever a user is doing in the application, all the information and insight associated with other functions are just a few clicks away.

“I liked that quality and risk are fed into one system.”- Kristie Giese, COO and Risk manager

• ActionCue makes collaboration natural. Typically, availability of the tools and information sources about clinical performance is role-based. This isolates perspectives and may miss contributions to safety and quality. It also inhibits visibility into overall process and progress. ActionCue facilitates collaboration across the entire team – staff and management –focused on improving care quality and safety.  The unique dashboard, event investigation workflows, real-time reports, team-built work products, and insightful presentation of information all form a naturally collaborative shared learning and working environment that produces results that everyone can see.

“ActionCue gives me one central deposit to see everything.” – Dr. Donald Brock, Regional Medical Director

• ActionCue’s user interface is made for humans. The prevailing opinion among hospital staff is that healthcare IT products are hard to use, ineffective and counterproductive. The user experience of ActionCue is the exact opposite. All of the key innovations described above are wrapped into a design that emphasizes ease of use, time savings, clarity of presentation, and support of both tactical and strategic goals.  Prista’s testimonials and 100% customer retention are compelling evidence that ActionCue stands apart from all the other solutions on the market today.

Part 1: Genuine Innovations

Part 3: Turning Innovation into Benefits

Part 4: The Strategic Benefit of Genuine Innovation

Genuine Innovation

Genuine Innovation

Part 1 of 4 in a series about putting genuine innovation to work

It is fashionable in many healthcare circles to talk about the need for innovation and technology to solve problems. But when it comes down to actually doing something about it, healthcare leaders seem to fear the re-engineered processes that are part of well-designed IT systems. The mantra is frequently, “that’s not what we do here,” and that mantra is used to fend off change. This resistance is especially strong when the processes in question focus on improving quality and safety.

Process is critical to ensuring consistency, performance and desired outcomes among fallible humans. The key, however, is not in the process itself but in the principles behind the process. The principles need to stay in place while the processes that express them evolve to align with new technologies that enable genuine and productive innovation.

“ActionCue is changing the standards of how hospitals manage quality care/ performance.” Rhonda Campbell, Chief Quality Officer

ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence is all about genuine innovation. It redefines the management process of improving patient care quality and safety while keeping the most important principles behind the process in place.

ActionCue did not originate with a “techie” view of things.  We started on the operations side, with a deep understanding of quality and safety improvement principles, as well as how these functions have been done in the past.  Then we figured out how to achieve optimal use of technology and a sophisticated user interface – an interface that is easy to use for both clinical and executive users. We also applied several technology-enabled process innovations.

The result? Genuine innovation.

We created a system that delivers ease of use, time savings, insight instead of data, and that contributes to improved outcomes and real-dollar return on investment.

ActionCue is the application that Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review reports health leaders rave about, and that has earned 100% customer retention because it really helps quality, safety and Performance Improvement teams do their best.

“Survey teams see it and they say that ActionCue is a great tool—what else do you need?” Shari Michl, Risk Manager & Chief Quality Officer

Part 2: The key innovations that make ActionCue effective, efficient and easy.

Part 3: Turning Innovation into Benefits

Part 4: The Strategic Benefit of Genuine Innovation

U.S. Boosts New Ebola Drug

Source: NBC News

The U.S. government says it will help develop a new Ebola drug — one of five drugs that are being tested against the deadly virus. This one’s made by North Carolina-based BioCryst Pharmaceuticals.

“BioCryst’s drug, BCX4430, is a small molecule that prevents the Ebola virus from reproducing in the body,” the Health and Human Services Department said in a statement. “Small molecule” means it can be taken as a pill.

“In non-human primate studies, the drug was effective against Ebola virus and Marburg virus, another virus in the filovirus family, indicating that BCX4430 may be useful as a broad spectrum antiviral drug.”

It’s being developed alongside ZMapp, Mapp Biopharmaceuticals’ antibody-based treatment; Canadian company Tekmira’s drug that interferes with genetic material; an antiviral called favipiravir and blood-based treatments using plasma from Ebola survivors.

Makers of a pill called brincidofovir have stopped testing it.

“We are making progress quickly to develop product candidates for clinical evaluation and to make products available that protect against this virus,” said Robin Robinson, who directs HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

More than 25,000 people have been infected with Ebola, according to the latest report from the World Health Organization, and more than 10,000 deaths have been recorded, although at least half and likely more of the patients have died, WHO says.

Officials say as long as Ebola is circulating, people can bring it to the United States. An American with Ebola is listed in fair condition at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. That patient and another 16 Americans were evacuated from Sierra Leone earlier this month.

On Tuesday, the University of Nebraska said five of the people quarantined there have been released after showing no signs of Ebola for 21 days.

…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.