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.
About the Author Faris Islam
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