Improving Your Patient Safety Information Management

Every hospital should examine its committee structure and the true effectiveness / value of each committee. This examination begins with asking some simple questions.

• Are there too many committees?
• Are our committees pursuing long outdated goals that are not keeping pace with the emerging issues challenging the hospital today?
• Are the committees getting the right information "into" their own committee, as well as "out to" the other committees?
• Are the committees sharing information "on time" - or do we see the words "Item Tabled" in our minutes more frequently than we should.
• Do we have unnecessary committees?
• Do we have the right committees but the wrong people attending?

To some degree, most hospitals would be forced to answer "yes" to these questions. And thus confirm that they may not be deriving the optimal value from the cost and time that in currently over-invested in committees.

Your Complete Patient Safety Improvement Solution Pack immediately gives you all the tools to:

• Incorporate and consolidate all patient safety activities into one existing committee - rather than requiring your hospital to form a new committee. As if any hospital in America needs another committee! Or worse yet, further delegate/fractionate PS responsibilities amongst additional committees - thereby further diluting the emphasis on patient safety improvement and minimizing your hope of a single reporting structure.
• The immediate economy of savings will be fewer managers attending fewer meetings. For example, any one committee with 10 department managers will cost a hospital a minimum of $300 an hour (10 x 30 per hour / avg. manager salary) plus the cost of lost productivity. How many meetings did you attend last week?
• Centralize ALL Patient Safety data collection, analysis, and corrective actions into one consolidated data management system without an IT investment - with our hallmark Patient Safety Improvement Dashboard. It's already set-up in MS Excel and MS Access with 130 Patient Safety Performance Improvement indicators. The immediate economy of savings will be fewer managers within your organization forced to waste time researching, translating research findings to hospital-specific application(s), formatting performance measures, (and yes often debating them endlessly in committee), then writing and presenting reports to a number of other committees.

Let's take these two (2) preceding value points and translate them into the common "committee management structure" of an average hospital in America today. The scenario would begin by posing a simple question to the CEO and the executive leadership team.

• "Do you have one single, consolidated report that you, the Medical Staff (and the Governing Board) have available to you to review routinely? A single dashboard that details your hospital's risk avoidance and performance status on the 130 most significant high risk procedures / activities in your hospital?" Is this value report available in one telephone call?

When it comes to using the best and correct Patient Safety (PS) information, many hospital leaders may be forced to answer "no" to the preceding question, falling back perhaps on the following description:

• "Some" medication-related PS activity is measured in the Pharmacy and reported to the P&T Committee…and perhaps elsewhere after that. The reports of this partial data set are generated bi-monthly and are available on the second Tuesday of the following month, after passing through the PI Council and the MEC. Hopefully.
• "Some" risk management-related PS activity is measured by the Risk Management Department, reported to many committees (who also meet at varying intervals). The reports of this partial approach are generated quarterly and are available on the third Thursday…of a different month.
• Some infection control information…Some medical record reviews…Some restraint documentation…Some patient falls data…And some hospital / facility safety gets "worked on" by different committees, during different weeks, all generating different reports (sometimes in different formats) also at different times. Probably.

We must confess that the unfortunate committee performance "structure" described above conjures up images of a highly contested soccer match, with endless energy spent and left on the field. Only to conclude with a final score of 2-1.

• Metaphorically, the committee participants are represented as the players -- and the crowd of 1000's watching closely signifies our patients. The entire crowd was rewarded with just 3 scores after witnessing considerable "activity"… hundreds of missed opportunities… and far too many attempts to pass the ball quite a distance from the net.

Cost Saving Patient Safety Value Packs

Individual Patient Safety Solution Documents

Back To Top