Tag Archives for " Industry News "

Evidence-based protocols drive quality improvement

An article published in FierceHelathcare’s eBook “Systemwide Transformations that Improve Healthcare Quality and Efficiency.” argues the best way to treat patients is with evidence-based protocols (EBPs).

Here is an excerpt:

In a new and evolving healthcare market that rewards efficiency and quality care, hospitals must find a way to streamline their systems to put forth better results for patients and more savings for their organizations.

One way to accomplish this is by focusing on evidence-based care protocols–the clinical care recommendations supported by the best available evidence in the clinical literature.

Although there may be 200 ways to do something, in some cases clinicians have strong evidence that reveals the best way to do it, says David J. Ballard, M.D., Ph.D., chief quality officer for Baylor Scott & White Health, a not-for-profit healthcare system based in Dallas that includes 46 hospitals and more than 500 patient care sites. For instance, Baylor implemented a standardized heart failure order set, which has the potential, if it were deployed across the country, to save $2 billion in annual hospital costs and prevent 1,500 in-hospital deaths annually.

The results of EBPs are better care for patients, and cost savings for healthcare organizations.

You can read more about Evidence-Based Practices here.

Hospital CEO Turnover – lack of tools for a key responsibility ?

Hospital CEO Turnover – lack of tools for a key responsibility ?

A recent article in Hospital Dive “Hospital CEO turnover: A symptom of a greater sickness?“, touched on some real problems that are actually somewhat peripheral to the CEO’s core functioning – including pressure from investors and payors and the general and historical challenges in IT for healthcare.

Obviously the most proximate and impactful measure of a CEO’s success is institutional financial success. However, that is merely the scoreboard for the functional and operational success of what hospitals and other healthcare delivery organizations do — deliver healthcare. Patient care quality is inescapably foundational to the operational and financial goals of any CEO of a healthcare delivery organization (HCDO).  More and more, regulations, practices and thinking in healthcare are holding CEOs directly responsible for patient care quality.  It is no longer sufficient to simply meet the mandates of external reporting, as delegated to mid-management specialists. As almost all other industries have embraced, hospital CEOs are needing to stay on top of “the numbers” or metrics of functional performance — preferably in, or near, real-time. This is the only way for a hospital CEO to not only drive patient care improvement but demonstrate her/his effectiveness at doing so.

The age-old methods and practices for managing Quality — largely paper, Excel spreadsheets or rudimentary systems for boffins and data analysts — simply do not cut it for regular use by CEOs. Queries, jotted notes, desktop calculations and raw data are not actionable or useful items alone. What the CEO needs is INSIGHT.

Insight (the highest order of the evolution of information) informs someone what he or she needs to do.  Simply passing responsibility for all of the queries, data manipulation, filtering and analysis off to subordinates fails to solve the real issue of involving the CEO in the work of driving improvement.  Advanced techniques in business intelligence, or BI, as used in other industries,  include normalizing,  compounding and distilling a lot of data into critical insights that a CEO can internalize in 10 minutes instead of four mind-numbing hours in a governing board meeting.  When a platform can do that, and be used by executives and clinical managers, the organization gains a whole new paradigm for managing clinical care quality which coalesces into a “culture of quality” that has staying power.

It was for this purpose that ActionCue Clinical Intelligence was created, and is steadily evolving.  We at Prista call the ability of the CEO, with the use of the ActionCue platform, to find out in 10 minutes exactly where performance issues exist within the entire clinical operation and what the organization is doing to correct them, the Fast Path to Insight™.

To learn how you can gain meaningful insight and quickly begin to improve your patient care, call today to request a short demonstration and find out how the ActionCue Clinical Intelligence software will work for you and your organization.