Patient Safety Solution

Based on safety and improvement science, the Patient Safety Solution consists of integrated, synergistic technology and services that provide comprehensive support for organizations seeking to reduce all-cause harm across the continuum of care.

• Solution technology consists of the Patient Safety Monitor^TM application—state-of-the-art analytics that empower detection, analysis, and improvement to prevent or mitigate patient harm and risk.
• Solution services consist of the ongoing support of Safety Partnership Services and membership in the Health Catalyst Patient Safety Organization (PSO) and its attendant Learning Collaborative and forums.

Together, the elements of the Patient Safety Solution represent an essential resource for organizations ready to accelerate the journey to zero harm.

The problem

It has been nearly twenty years since the publication of “To Err is Human,” the National Academy of Medicine’s eye-opening report on the widespread problem of patient harm from preventable medical errors. So what has changed in two decades of effort? Not nearly enough. As a leading cause of death in the United States, preventable healthcare harm remains a serious public health issue—not to mention a major factor in unsustainable increases in healthcare costs.

Our approach

The Patient Safety Solution brings together Health Catalyst’s deep expertise and the analytic power of our Patient Safety Monitor Suite to support a multifactorial approach:

• Data, metrics, analytics, and monitoring systems that can deliver insight into all-cause harm trends, patterns, and causes—including active surveillance trigger tools and safety analytics to detect risks and support interventions
• Governance, leadership, accountability, and aligned incentives to drive a focus on harm reduction and the creation of a High Reliability Organization (HRO)
• Assessment-driven intervention and care system redesigns that support a culture of safety and the specific behaviors that continually strengthen it
• Participation in a collaborative managed within a patient safety organization (PSO) to build and share learning and establish a protected environment for analysis

Benefits and features

• Streamline work, deepen insight, and achieve meaningful improvement. Unlike traditional manual, siloed approaches to patient safety, which focus narrowly on specific types of adverse events and find less than 5 percent of all-cause harm, Patient Safety Monitor technology automates reporting, provides predictive data, and delivers all-cause harm identification and analysis. And with safety experts providing regular patient safety event reviews, organizations can move from data findings to best practice interventions that truly transform patient outcomes.
• Build the structures and culture of a High Reliability Organization. Via ongoing at-the-elbow support and coaching, our patient safety experts can help you craft an effective patient safety governance structure, implement a sound improvement methodology, and actively foster individual and team behaviors that build psychological safety and collaborative approaches to harm prevention.
• Learn more, improve faster—and reduce all-cause patient harm. Under the legal protection of our PSO, our Learning Collaborative and User Forum allow you to participate in peer discussion and benchmarking, access support to maximize use of the Patient Safety Monitor tool, and share challenges and best practices with other organizations—all in venues in which “everyone teaches, and everyone learns.”

Use cases

A quality officer using the Patient Safety Monitor observes a clinically confirmed rising rate of nursing-sensitive harm events (falls, pressure injuries). He discusses 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.

Working with finance and the safety/risk team, Health Catalyst experts verify the relationship between the harm tend and the staffing adjustment and present the data to senior leadership. They suggest a multipoint intervention to educate nurses on prevention, increase nurse staffing on selected critical areas and reassess other barriers to nursing work that can mitigate falls and pressure injuries.

Health Catalyst safety experts recommend formal balance metrics for some interventions (i.e., staffing changes) to ensure early detection of unintended consequences. As the technology/services are bundled within Patient Safety Solution, all of the organization’s patient safety work products, deliberations, improvement work, agendas, meeting minutes, etc. are protected under PSO and are not discoverable in federal or state courts.