Ultimately, improving the quality of health care and preventing harm requires a certain degree of self-reflection.
Heidi Raines, founder and CEO of Performance Health Partners, told HIMSSCast that along with digital transformation, implementing an easy-to-use incident reporting system can help healthcare organizations address today’s major patient safety concerns, including medication errors, delays in care, workplace violence, and preventing patient falls.
“Every near miss is an opportunity to see where things could go wrong,” giving the hospital a chance to fix the problem before the next patient arrives.
While technology plays an integral role in promoting better patient outcomes, incident reporting can also cut employee turnover, according to the authors of Shared Voices: A Framework for Patient and Employee Safety in Healthcare.
When one organization analyzed shift-by-shift incident reporting data, the data visualization revealed error patterns and was able to reduce medication errors by 51 percent, she said.
Raines explains how pragmatic tactics—like leadership engagement—can also help foster a culture of psychological safety for employees. When leaders empower frontline employees to “reinvest” and directly impact quality improvement, they also increase employee retention.
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Communication skill:
- Complex interactions and trust building in healthcare
- Record any emergency situations for safer care
- Dive into incident reporting trends and eliminate root causes
- Modernize systems and implement incident reporting programs
- Changing human culture and strategies to increase bug reporting
- Remove barriers to speaking up and make reporting easy and fast
More information about this episode:
Q&A: Patient Safety Begins with Data-Driven Leadership
A new approach helps Atrium Health reduce falls – and the costs associated with them
Study says group nursing may lead to patient deaths, higher costs
Overcoming employee resistance through change management
User-unfriendly EHRs pose serious risks to patient safety
