Category Archives for Healthcare Innovation

Want happy patients? It starts with happy hospital staff.

Engage your staff and be ‘amazed’ at what follows. Historically, hospitals have adopted a patient-centric mission. But Beryl Companies CEO Paul Spiegelman and Britt Berrett, President of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, part of the Texas Health Resources system, suggest in a recent article that if hospitals can find meaningful ways to raise the morale or their staff (read: happiness), the rest of their clinical and financial goals, as well as their patient satisfaction scores, will follow.

“If you focus on building internal engagement, that will drive patient engagement and loyalty and that will drive financial sustainability,” Spiegelman said. There are many ways to improve morale. Providing the best systems and processes to address your Risk, Quality and Performance Improvement initiatives is a great place to start.

Before you click away thinking this is just a shameless plug for our ActionCue hospital risk management software, take a minute to think about the current system you are using in your hospital to manage your Risk, Quality and performance improvement initiatives. If your hospital is like most, you are still using home-grown paper or excel spreadsheet systems. I am willing to bet you spend an overwhelming amount of time putting together reports for hospital executives that are based on information days, weeks or even months old. And… I’m also willing to wager that you wish there was a better, easier and faster way to do you job.

Current Risk and Quality Management systems in healthcare organizations is the source for a lot of wasted time and frustration in over 70% of hospitals nation-wide. Improving working conditions for all levels of hospital staff (executives, nurses, risk, quality and performance improvement managers) can and will increase staff morale — and in turn, better patient care quality.

So if you don’t smile just a little bit when you think about your current Risk/Quality Management, Performance Improvement system then you need to consider why and what you can do to improve it.

Be happy, try ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.

To read the full article from the Texas Health Resources system, click here.

To learn more about the ActionCue hospital risk management software click here.

Readmissions Are Gonna Cost You.

The converse side of saving money from the implementation of performance improvement, incident reporting systems, and a culture of quality, is losing a whole lot more due to bad outcomes, poor incident management and patient readmissions.

According to a report out by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), between January and November 2011 hospitals spent $41.3 billion treating patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge. Of that number, nearly 1.8 million readmissions cost the Medicare program $24 billion, 600,000 privately insured patient readmissions totaled $8.1 billion, 700,000 Medicaid patient readmissions cost hospitals $7.6 billion and uninsured patients were readmitted at a  cost of $1.5 billion.

Highlighting the need for the healthcare industry adopt new means of tracking adverse incidents, the AHRQ said in the study, “[I]dentifying conditions that contribute the most to the total number of readmissions and related costs for all payers may aid healthcare stakeholders in deciding which conditions to target to maximize quality improvement and cost-reduction efforts,”.

It is this simple task of tracking adverse events which most hospitals have no efficient means of recording and acting on. Recent statistics report that nearly 75% of all hospitals in the United States are utilizing antiquated systems, relying on paper or spreadsheets, for their Risk and Quality Management. However, healthcare is coming around to performance improvement technologies pioneered and perfected in other industries — such as manufacturing — which provide real-time, accurate insight into a hospital’s quality program.

At first it takes some time to understand why an IT approach, to what has traditionally just been a passive reporting method of quality improvement, is preferable. But, it is the real-time insight that a thoughtful algorithm, within an Incident Management Software like ActionCue Clinical Intelligence, can provide which is so invaluable.

In today’s day-and-age, it is no longer necessary for patient safety and hospital management data to be delayed by days, weeks or months. Inexpensive, web-based systems, like ActionCue, deliver immediate information to staff at all levels of a hospital’s organization, allowing for a prompt and precise response to patient safety and healthcare quality issues — improving patient care and reducing hospital costs.

Does your Risk/QI Program Make You Happy?

Not, “are you happy with it.” But, does it actually make you happy? Does it make your job easier and is it improving healthcare quality in your hospital? If your answer is “no” then a closer look at how you are going about your Risk Management, Quality and Performance Improvement in your hospital is in order.

It may sound silly to say that a risk or quality management system can literally bring joy to your job. But, only if you haven’t experienced what a platform like ActionCue Clinical Intelligence can do. The founders of Prista Corporation, and many of our staff, started out where you are, a Risk/Quality Professional tasked with tracking adverse events and reporting data up to hospital executives. Oh, but you also need to continue with your other duties as well, and somewhere in the middle of tracking events and compiling reports you are expected to provide insight on what the data means… it’s overwhelming for even the best of us.

That’s why Prista developed the ActionCue application. They saw a desperate need within healthcare for a simpler way of tracking events, compiling data, providing actionable insight to executives, and making the jobs easier for Risk and Quality Professionals just like you.

A truly effective process is liberating, invisible, and collaborative — not cumbersome and taxing. I like using the old adage, “Many hands make light work.” The beauty of ActionCue Clinical Intelligence is that every level of the hospital organization is involved in the system. Imagine, a Risk and Quality Management program with data and insight at your fingertips, front-line staff on up to executives all working within the same system, benchmarking and reporting all available in real-time. It’s possible with ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.

So if you don’t smile just a little bit when you think about your current Risk/Quality Management, Performance Improvement system then you need to consider why.

Be happy, try ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.

Hospital Quality Initiatives Save Nearly $1.5B

In 2012, more than 1,500 hospitals participated with the Hospital Engagement Network (HEN) in an initiative aimed at reducing harm and cutting readmissions of patients, which led to saving more than $1.3 billion, according to a statement from the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET).

HEN, a collaboration between Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) and the American Hospital Association (AHA), is focused on improving healthcare quality, improve hospital infrastructures and promote a culture of quality.

In a news release by HRET, the program prevented:

• • Nearly 19,000 early-elective deliveries
  • More than 11,000 readmissions
  • More than 8,500 infections

“The latest results from the HEN effort are outstanding and highlight the success that quality improvement professionals can make within their hospitals and health systems,” said Maulik Joshi, president of HRET and senior vice president for AHA.

This should be beacon for hospital executives and administrators who are searching for ROI on the quality and performance initiatives they are funding. Innovations in healthcare quality IT incident management and hospital management software, like the ActionCue application, are revolutionizing how hospitals provide care to patients. By introducing IT technologies perfected in other industries to the performance and quality management of hospitals, it is now becoming possible for administrators and front-line staff to visualize, in real-time, the performance of their hospital — allowing for near immediate actions to correct adverse incidents — preventing bad outcomes, improving patient care and dramatically reducing hospital costs.

A Tale of Reinvention

Have you heard the news? Nurses want to spend more time with their patients. Let’s see… it’s 2014 and we are still challenged with an issue that has been around since I was in nursing school (for reference, telephones all had cords back then).  Healthcare is bursting at the seams with news of nurses wanting more time with patients, patients wanting more time with nurses, and concluding that when the twain shall meet, good things happen like infection rates go down, fall rates go down, and patient satisfaction goes way, way up [ http://on.wsj.com/1nZTwcM ]. That’s not the only tale we continue to tell. There is also the one about the franken-nurse, the Quality-Risk-CaseManager-Chief Nursing Nurse with so many roles that she feels at a loss to authentically attend to any one of them unless led there by crisis.

Needs are identified across industries all the time, and they promote innovation and solutions – the mother of invention kind of thing. What would happen in the Communications industry if consumers expressed the need to interact with each other in real time?  Guess what? It happened. Innovations galore – like Skype™, instant messaging, etc. – swept in to fill the gap created by the need.  I haven’t read an article in a decade about people pining away for lack of online social connectivity.

Healthcare has done some great things and is now in a period of unprecedented evolution. So, now is a good time to fix long-standing process deficiencies (cultural deficiencies?) that keep patients and nurses from getting what they want.

I came across an intriguing article by Henry Doss about design thinking and its inspiring application to a problem identified by a healthcare clinic [ http://onforb.es/1jNuUHR ].

Venice Family Clinic in California was going to open a new clinic. Not only did the site require bricks and mortar construction, but they also took advantage of the opportunity to re-design how they did everything from patient check-in, to patient experience. And, of course, any process changes had to be efficient and lower costs. When this idea was proposed to the hospital team – control costs while achieving high quality outcomes – it sounded like a contradiction in terms.

The clinic administrators reached out to a design thinking company to jump start the creative process. Once in motion, the hospital team itself discovered their own inherent ability to think and create in a way that they hadn’t before. They asked these simple questions to begin with: “Should there be a check-in desk taking up most of the lobby? Should thirty waiting patients be funneled through six reception windows to receive care in the twenty-two available exam rooms? Must the patients be left idle while they wait for care? Is there a better way to use the clinic space and the patients’ time?” The clinic team was then shown how pit crews at auto races manage time and maximize efficiency. This led to the idea that someone with an iPad or similar would walk up and greet each patient as they arrived. Mobilize staff to go to the patient to avoid wait times. Thank you, pit crew. Other innovations were born as the team at Venice Family Clinic was handed a moment of creative confidence that isn’t usually a part of the milieu.

Challenges like nurses being buried in too many managerial roles and needing to spend more time with patients continue to play out in every healthcare system, and maybe it’s time to rethink how we think about it. Fastcompany [ http://bit.ly/1cTIMMk ]  says “Defining the problem via design thinking requires the suspension of judgment in defining the problem statement. The right words are important. It’s not ‘design a chair’, it’s…’create a way to suspend a person’. Frame the problem in a way that invites creative solutions.”

I am fortunate to be able to see out-of-the-box thinking at ActionCue every day. A culture of empathy for what is going to improve the way the customer does her job is always at the top of the list. Any business – clinic and hospital included – can do this. Here’s a really fun video by Daylight Design, Inc. about how a team of design thinkers took on the very serious issue of childhood obesity. As you watch, be mindful of the process of thinking creatively about your specific issues and about who your priority is. Maybe there is a way to turn the story about long-standing problems into the moment that everything changed.