In our November 2 webinar, The Keys to Moving Patient Safety Beyond the Status Quo, patient safety professionals from Atlas Healthcare Partners and AdventHealth came together to discuss the challenges their organizations faced with optimizing patient safety outcomes and how they solved them.

Webinar Panelists:

• Bill Schwacke, Healthcare Practice Lead, Origami Risk
• Charity Cox-Hayden, MBA, BSN, RN, Chief Nursing Officer, Atlas Healthcare Partners
• Derek Mitzel, DO, MBA, Chief Medical Officer, Banner Ambulatory Surgery
• Jean Hood, RN MSN CPHRM CPPS FASHRM, Director, Clinical Risk Management, AdventHealth
• Mary Jo Thompson, RN MBA CPHRM CPPS FASHRM, Senior Loss Control Manager, AdventHealth
• Enoch Dinsley, Data System Supervisor, AdventHealth

Setting the Stage: The Current State of Patient Safety and Why Programs Have Stalled

Bill Schwacke opened the discussion by presenting concepts outlined in the white paper, Improving Patient Safety: 6 Ways to Move Beyond the Status Quo, and highlighted the most pressing challenges for patient safety leaders, which include: 

• Continuing infection rates
• Patient harm remains above zero
• Burnout costs have accelerated
• Communication concerns and errors 

Despite the stubborn challenges facing patient safety professionals, Bill added that adopting a strategy incorporating technology that enables and expands progress can move the status quo forward. He outlined a 6-point model that uses technology at its core to support alignment across healthcare organizations.

Graphic of the 6-point model that works toward creating systemic change in organizations’ patient safety programs.

To achieve these goals, patient safety technology should be configured to meet the following objectives:

• Everyone needs to participate
  • Ease of reporting incidents and near-misses
  • Close the loop with reporters
  • Availability of intuitive dashboards
• Moving key indicators forward
  • Organizational learning
  • Root-cause methodologies — including fishbone, RCA2, and the 5 whys
• Better data leads to better insights
  • Integrated healthcare RMIS
  • Accurately monitor for specific causes/symptoms to mitigate problems early

Atlas Healthcare Partners and Banner Health

Charity Cox-Hayden and Dr. Derek Mitzel then spoke about how Atlas Healthcare Partners and Banner Health, with over 700 employees, 450+ physician utilizers, and 29 sites across Arizona and Colorado, improved patient safety and healthcare quality through technology.

Read Next: How to Improve Patient Safety in 6 Steps

Charity and Dr. Mitzel outlined the challenge their organization was facing – their risk management processes were manual and created multiple source data tracking and reporting, which resulted in overall inability to reduce inconsistency in their safety and quality practice. Recognizing this hurdle, the team outlined organizational requirements for a single-solution and automation system. Ultimately, the organization chose Origami as its healthcare risk and patient safety management provider. 

Wrapping up their section, Charity and Dr. Mitzel walked the audience through the tactics, benefits, and outcome of their efforts, which included:

• Implementation of an event reporting dashboard has increased ease of use, organizational participation, reduced silos, decreased reporting variation, and improved visibility of results
• Automated task management has improved communication flow, and enhanced alignment and decision-making ability
• Implementation of a peer review process has helped to close the loop with reporters, enhance transparency, and improve patient safety culture
• Root Cause Analysis tools helped to reduce system complexity, visualize trends and outliers, and turn data into insight

AdventHealth

The team from AdventHealth – Jean Hood, Mary Jo Thompson, and Enoch Dinsley – then discussed their organization’s process for utilizing actionable data to improve patient safety and their experience with a new RMIS implementation as part of that journey.

Read Next: How to Align Patient Safety Technology with Healthcare’s Largest Complexity

Established in 1973, AdventHealth currently operates 50 hospital campuses, 10 skilled nursing facilities, 18 home health and hospice agencies, and 40+ urgent care facilities across nine states with over 80,000 employees and physicians serving 5,000,000+ patients annually.

With a large footprint, the team at AdventHealth found that their previous vendor was becoming obsolete, with unreliable product support and cumbersome analytic reports. Recognizing the need for a new system to support the organization’s growing number of locations, employees, and patients, the team embarked on the search for a new system, and outlined a few key requirements, including patient safety incident reporting, employee safety incident reporting, claim management, workers’ compensation, regulatory reporting, insurance, and accounting.

After recapping their vendor selection process, the team then walked through the process of starting over with Origami as their new healthcare risk management system, how they went about moving from their current state to an ideal state, the data migration process, and implementation experience. As Mary Jo Thompson put it, “we recognized a golden opportunity to add improved standardization to our process” and as a result, the team developed a data dictionary for improved use by the end-user.

Read Next: The Guide to Selecting a Healthcare Risk Management Solution

Lastly, the team summarized key lessons learned from their technology journey:

• Implementation of an easy-to-customize software system has helped to easily respond to emerging requirements, evolve with the organization, and shift to a more proactive approach
• Implementation of a Data Dictionary standardized event entry, improved trending and analysis capabilities, and increased organizational learning
• Customized dynamic dashboards helped identify areas for improvement, and improve communication capabilities and rapid buy-in

Closing Thoughts

Closing out the discussion, Bill highlighted that the panelists outlined proven examples of how technology can help “move the patient safety needle” including insights such as:

• Organizational design and ease of use both have a significant impact
• Integration with existing tools yields high results & increased satisfaction
• Single system approach = deeper insights
• Standardization of data and analytics = decision-making ability
• Configuration, now and in the future, allows organizations to change and adapt

Bill concluded the discussion by discussing how increasing complexity in healthcare, coupled with the onslaught of emerging trends and growth and consolidation in the healthcare industry, means that the status quo of using disparate technology to manage risks and patient safety initiatives, is no longer viable. If healthcare organizations are to move beyond the issues posed by homegrown systems, outdated, and static technologies, they need to adopt strategies that enable everyone in the organization to actively participate in the event management process. 

With a highly-configurable and extendable technology platform, healthcare organizations can break down the silos and culture limitations that keep them stuck, and ultimately move to a more proactive position, reduce risks of burnout, and position themselves to move toward zero harm and improve the patient experience.

To learn more about how Origami Risk can help your organization improve its patient safety program, read our white paper “Improving Patient Safety: 6 Ways to Move Beyond the Status Quo,” or start a conversation with us. To watch the full panel on-demand, click here.