Ultimately improving the quality of care healthcare systems deliver and preventing harm requires a degree of self-reflection.
Along with digital transformation, putting an easy-to-use incident reporting system in place can help healthcare organizations address today’s chief patient safety concerns, including medication errors, care delays, workplace violence and preventing patient falls, said Heidi Raines, founder and CEO of Performance Health Partners, on HIMSSCast.
“Every close call is an opportunity to see where things might be going wrong,” offering hospitals a chance to fix issues before the next patient.
While technology is integral for catalyzing better patient outcomes, incident reporting can also cut employee turnover, according to the author of Shared Voices: A Framework for Patient and Employee Safety in Healthcare.
When one organization dissected incident reporting data by shift, data visualizations revealed patterns in errors and was able to reduce medication errors by 51%, she said.
Raines explained how pragmatic tactics – like leadership rounding – can also help foster a culture of psychological safety for employees. When leaders empower frontline staff to “invest back” and directly impact quality improvements, they also strengthen employee retention.
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Talking points:
- Complex interactions and building trust in healthcare
- Documenting every close call to make care safer
- Drilling into incident reporting trends and eliminating root causes
- Modernizing systems and implementing incident reporting programs
- Culture change and people strategies to enhance error reporting
- Ending barriers to speaking up and making reporting easy and fast
More about this episode:
Q&A: Patient safety derives from data-driven leadership
A new approach helps Atrium Health reduce falls – and the costs associated with them
Team nursing could lead to patient deaths, higher costs, says study
Breaking through staff resistance with change management
User-unfriendly EHRs pose serious risks to patient safety