A healthcare risk manager must focus on many competing priorities to reduce patient harm and prevent costly claims. Often, they are tracking hundreds of events per day and need to be able to quickly monitor, analyze and act on data with policy or procedural improvements.

Unfortunately, many healthcare risk managers spend too much time retrieving data from outdated and disparate sources and manually building reports they critically need. A risk manager armed with modern and efficient tools can help minimize the risk of errors, patient deaths, accidents, and other adverse events. Minimizing the administrative burden gives them back much needed time to focus on what really matters – reducing patient harm.

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) stresses the use of technology to synchronize risk mitigation efforts across the entire organization and helps remove risk associated with siloed departments.¹ Applied Safety Intelligence^TM, RLDatix’s new framework, helps organizations eliminate gaps in information and moves health care from a reactive approach to risk management to one rooted in safety and prevention.

Sharing data within a centralized data management system helps ensure collaboration. When Risk and Quality departments collaborate, they are better equipped to identify and address any overlapping issues that could be solved through a joint effort. This collaboration supports efficiency and ultimately improves patient care and safety.

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Health IT and Patient Safety report emphasizes that software usability is a key driver of safety. Health professionals work in complex, high-risk, and frequently chaotic environments fraught with interruptions, time pressures, and incomplete, disorganized, and overwhelming amounts of information. They require technologies that make their work easier and safer, rather than more difficult. Health IT solutions should promote efficiency and ease of use while minimizing the likelihood of human error.²

IOM also states that the design and development of products affects safe performance and the extent to which clinician users will accept or reject the technology. They emphasize that the following system attributes lead to increased user adoption:²  

·       Easy retrieval of accurate, timely, and reliable native and imported data

·       A system the user wants to interact with

·       Simple and intuitive data displays

·       Easy navigation

Integrated data reduces time spent retrieving from other sources and enables risk managers to spend more time focusing on other priorities. User friendly and efficient tools include:

•   Easy to Read Icons: helping staff select accurate categorizations for events, speeding up the data entry process and making the tool enjoyable to use

•   EHR Data Integration: pulling patient information directly from an EHR into an incident form improves accuracy and speed of data entry.

•    Ability to Flag Adverse Events: such as adverse drug reactions, falls, pressure ulcers, or infections before they happen provides actionable insight. This insight can then be acted upon with review of hospital procedures or policies to reduce future harm and save lives.  

•   Easy to Read Dashboards: being able to quickly and accurately access data to track incident trends and outliers that have the potential to greatly impact the hospital is critical to creating efficiencies. Robust and interactive dashboards also help risk managers make a solid business case to leadership for patient safety initiatives.  

Risk managers and front-line staff are more likely to effectively utilize user-friendly and time-saving risk management software than tools that are too time-consuming or confusing to understand. For a risk manager, event data that can be easily retrieved and shared through a centralized and integrated data system helps them see the big picture. This also helps them quickly zero in on areas that drive the most improvement. For front-line staff, ease of use encourages more incident entries, driving a continuous reporting and learning culture.

RLDatix enables risk managers to see a comprehensive view of safety across the enterprise by breaking down departmental silos to create a complete picture of operations. Reach out to us for a complimentary assessment of your healthcare risk management needs. Together, we can ease your burden and improve patient safety. 

To learn more about how integrated risk management can drive collaboration and performance improvements read our blog, The Impact of Healthcare Quality and Risk Departments Teaming Up for Safer Care.

Sources: 

1.     Puchley, T. & Toppi C., (2018, April 1). ERM: Evolving From Risk Assessment to Strategic Risk Management. HFMA,  www.hfma.org/topics/hfm/2018/april/60137.html. Retrieved 2020-12-28.

2.     Institute of Medicine. 2012. Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13269.