Patient Safety Monitor

The Patient Safety Monitor Application is a modular, scalable application that provides comprehensive support for key safety improvement activities: detection via automated surveillance, voluntary event reporting, and audits; analysis of risk, events, and care delivery; and improvement facilitated by monitoring and visualizations to prevent and mitigate harm.

The Patient Safety Monitor application centralizes automated safety surveillance, incident reporting, care audits, sophisticated analytics, and improvement project activities to support a comprehensive patient safety program.

The problem

From penalties to pandemics, healthcare systems confront compelling patient safety and public health needs that necessitate a more automated and active approach to safety improvement work. Several challenges prevent most systems from achieving zero harm, including complexity, insufficient data, staffing, and burnout. Forward-thinking organizations recognize the need to leverage data and analytics to improve their safety outcomes—and support their journey to become a High Reliability Organization (HRO)—though lack user-friendly and effective tools to do the job.

Our approach

Unlike traditional manual, siloed approaches, Patient Safety Monitor supports a comprehensive approach to improving patient outcomes and lowering costs.

• Surveil. Detects the magnitude and nature of harm or risk, and variation in care delivery.
• Report. Captures events that are voluntarily reported by staff to support investigation of conditions that create risk for error.
• Audit. Facilitates more efficient assessment of potential incidents to fill gaps in EMR data and create a holistic view of harm, risk, and care deviation for medication errors, hospital acquired conditions, etc.
• Analytics. Uses data to understand and predict harm or risk and gain insight to support process improvement planning.
• Improvement. Manages improvement projects to reduce CMS harm penalties, decrease cost per case, and improve patient outcomes.

Benefits and features

• Increase visibility to patient safety events by 10x. Automated surveillance flags data values indicative of potential or actual safety issues, helping you identify the magnitude and nature of all-cause harm.
• Simplify incident reporting. A streamlined, user-friendly workflow for staff to report – either anonymously or with their username – and manage patient safety events; a feedback loop keeps the reporter appraised of issue resolution.
• Conduct comprehensive safety analysis. Integrated data from events and care audits support deeper data analysis and better inform improvement activities.
• Streamline improvement work. Dashboards identify trends and root causes of harm and risk, facilitate efficient prioritization of safety work, and empower leaders to monitor outcomes.
• Enable efficient and effective patient safety activities. A certified Patient Safety Organization (PSO) provides a legally protected space for safety improvement work, which encourages more participation and action.

Use cases

• An infection preventionist and quality officer using Patient Safety Monitor observe a clinically confirmed rising rate of nursing-sensitive harm events (falls, pressure injuries, and hospital-acquired infections). They discuss the trend with nursing leaders and unit medical directors, and the group hypothesizes that recent reductions to nurse staffing (nurse:patient ratios) in some care units may be related. Root-cause analysis supports this hypothesis.
• The chief medical officer and director of pharmacy lead their organization’s opioid stewardship program and seek insight into patient oversedation. They establish a data trigger to detect Narcan administration events, then use the data to analyze opportunities to intervene and improve patient outcomes. The team’s newfound visibility into patient oversedation and opioid reversal events supports organization-wide evolution of treatment protocols and order sets, resulting in measurable and sustainable process change.
• A healthcare facility staff member cares about patient safety, but fears retribution from their colleagues and supervisor. When they report an incident, they are discouraged by the number of required fields—and the staff member is not even sure if anyone reads it. Now, with Patient Safety Monitor, they can submit reports anonymously without losing visibility into the status of the event. The required questions help ensure they complete reports quickly and receive a response with the built-in feedback loop.