Did you know hospital medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States? According to the New England Journal of Medicine, this would equate to about 700 people per day. That’s why patient safety is paramount, and it’s getting an extra focus as part of Patient Safety Awareness Week.
Tweet: How healthcare organizations are using analytics to promote patient safety
While there’s a lot that hospitals do to promote patient safety that has to do with training people and improving processes, there is also a lot they can do in terms of technology to help them out. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at three hospitals and how they are using analytics for patient safety initiatives.
Sarasota Memorial Hospital
- 819-bed regional medical center located in Sarasota, FL
- Only hospital in Florida to receive a 5-star rating from Medicare for quality
Sarasota Memorial Hospital wanted to gain better insights about its patient safety measures. It therefore adopted a technology that would not only reduce its expenses and improve patient care, but also drive its quality and safety initiatives.
The organization has been using Dimensional Insight’s Diver Platform to help display surveys, such as the Safety Culture Survey from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ), and scorecards, which display information such as length of stay, mortalities, patient satisfaction, and more. Members of the organization then use these dashboards to highlight areas of performance as well as areas of improvement daily. With the dashboards, the hospital has been able to gain new insights into its safety measures and has been able to cut back financial and operational expenses while seeing increased patient satisfaction results.
Learn more about Sarasota Memorial Hospital’s safety initiatives.
Baptist Health South Florida
- Regional health system with more than 1,700 beds
- One of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For
Baptist Health South Florida has been using technology to make improvements on patient outcomes and safety. The hospital has been using Diver since 2005 in various ways, such as developing an automated tool for analyzing quality metrics and initiating a physician scorecard that allows for internal analysis and interaction between physicians.
For example, the organization has been using Diver to evaluate and monitor patients for early identification of sepsis. The hospital built an assessment tool within its EMR that the nurses need to update after completing each shift. This tool uses multiple criteria to identify patients showing early signs of sepsis. With Diver, Baptist Health South Florida can monitor and evaluate the actual performance of the assessment. Since incorporating the Diver report, the tool is being used in all inpatient departments and compliance is in the high 90s, compared to its original compliance rate of approximately 23% within the ICU.
Read more about some other ways Baptist Health South Florida is using Diver in the organization.
What’s next for patient safety?
Patient Safety Awareness Week allows us to reflect on the impact of technology on patient care within organizations to reduce the number of deaths caused by medical errors. Data and analytics will continue to play a role in the industry by helping organizations identify areas of good performance as well as improvement. These tools can help hospitals prioritize patient safety. As challenges continue to emerge, technology can help those in healthcare balance organizational trends, industry issues, and put patients’ safety and care first.
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