An increased government focus on measuring the performance of healthcare organizations is driving demand for Electronic Risk Management Assistant (ERMA), a product developed by Catapult Consultants, a leading professional services and healthcare solutions firm, to help with the risk management process.
“With the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stating its expectations of QAPI (Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement) the importance of collecting valid data to identify and monitor an effective Performance Improvement Project (PIP) couldn’t be more important,” said William Senich, CEO of Catapult Consultants.
“In addition, the federal government and CMS is looking to healthcare facilities and providers to identify mechanisms and processes that can identify potential risks from existing patterns and be used as a preventive indicator of future occurrences.”
He added that it is important for electronic risk management systems to be user friendly and to meld seamlessly into the day-to-day operations of a healthcare organization. With this in mind, ERMA is designed to make the collection of data as easy as possible.
“So much of risk management, in particular the collection of valid data, is driven by how easy the system is to get the data into it,” said Senich. “We positioned ERMA to either load the data automatically or make it part of the normal workflow that the healthcare professionals on site are doing in their normal job function.”
ERMA offers healthcare facilities a way to identify underlying quality assurance issues while driving down the costs associated with preventable events. It provides access to key information allowing for early intervention and cause analysis for incident prevention. In addition, ERMA complies with quality measure and initiatives from federal and state government.
Today ERMA is utilized in over 600 long-term care facilities and is rapidly growing and being made available to other healthcare organizations across the country.
“I think the demands for data are going to explode,” said Senich. “On the analytics side we’re beginning to migrate analytics technologies and algorithms from the national security community which are used to dealing with very large heterogeneous data sets.
“We’re migrating that into this environment and we’re finding that the goal is really more risk management in terms of predicting and mitigating risks before they occur. We believe that ERMA is a unique platform for being able not only to do that but also to prove that the mitigation techniques that you’ve implemented are having their desired effect.”
Electronic, management tools, Catapult Consultants, QAPI (Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement), electronic risk management
