Patient Safety Monitor™ Application

The Patient Safety Monitor Application monitors incoming patient data from multiple sources in near real-time. The application alerts a health provider’s patient safety organization based on pre-built or client-defined clinical trigger events and rules. It also providers the option to drill down to different levels for further insight on improvement opportunities. Unlike a patient record system or EMR, this documentation is stored in a protected area governed by the clients’ PSO, where it can be used for process and quality improvement and is not available for legal discovery.

The Patient Safety Monitor application dashboard shows categorized and ranked harm detection and public health triggers for a selected facility.

The problem

From penalties to pandemics, healthcare systems may confront compelling patient safety and public health needs that necessitate a more automated and active approach to safety monitoring. And even in the absence of these drivers, forward-thinking organizations often recognize the need to leverage data and analytics to improve their safety outcomes—and support their journey to become a High Reliability Organization (HRO).

Our approach

Unlike traditional manual, siloed approaches to patient safety, which focus narrowly on specific types of adverse events and miss most harm and risk, Patient Safety Monitor enables comprehensive identification and analysis of all-cause harm and public health threats. Triggers for emerging threats (such as COVID-19) support enhanced biosurveillance monitoring and help organizations collaborate with public health agencies.

Benefits and features

• Build a safety net. Two units of triggers—harm detection and public health—flag utilization, symptom, and clinical test and care patterns, enabling early detection and timely intervention.
• Improve patient outcomes and lower costs. Safety analytics are accessible within the workflow at the point of care, enabling proactive harm prevention, effective care, and timely public health response.
• Free clinicians and infection preventionists to focus on patient care. Automated data extraction and reporting lifts the burden of manual data searching, aggregation, and reporting.
• Analyze all-cause harm and public health threats under the legal protection of a certified Patient Safety Organization (PSO). The Health Catalyst PSO enables clinicians to surface information and act without the fear of legal discovery.
• Gain an understanding of performance at-a-glance. Easily filter data to drill down to different levels for further insight on improvement opportunities.

Use cases

• The oncology service line is interested in tracking care of patients with Febrile Neutropenia. Patient Safety Monitor allows them to see how well they are meeting their organization’s process metrics around blood cultures, antibiotic timing, and antibiotic selection.
• A board of trustees has adopted a “safety as a system” initiative to focus on the whole-patient measure of safety as the metric for the three-year operating plan. The operating plan goal is to achieve a rate of zero all-cause harm events within three years. Patient Safety Monitor was chosen to provide continuous monitoring, measurement, management, and prevention of all-cause harm events to meet the Board’s three-year goal.
• An epidemiologist is tracking cases of COVID-19 across her healthcare system. First, she wants to understand the spread of the virus in her healthcare system. Then, she wants to understand the spread in her community. Working with system physicians and Health Catalyst clinical experts, her team configures COVID triggers and uses the Surveillance Module to boost detection, identify overall trends in system prevalence, and collaborate with public health officials on a community response.