Lack of access to reliable harm-monitoring data prevents meaningful improvement in preventing and mitigating risk to patients.
This is according to a new white paper published by Pascal Metrics, a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) that specializes in using real-time clinical data to improve the safety and reliability of care.
Pascal Metrics surveyed patient safety professionals from hospitals across the United States during the National Patient Safety Foundation’s 2014 Patient Safety Congress, held May 13-16 in Orlando, Florida. The results of the survey are published in the paper “Current Use of Technology in Automating Patient Harm Identification: A Survey of Patient Safety Leaders.”
Ninety percent of respondents noted that patient harm is commonly discussed in their healthcare system, but only 24 percent said they felt their current technologies show detailed harm rates and patterns in their units. This raises the question of whether they have enough data to make these conversations optimally useful as they look to address the issue of patient harm.
“Most hospital discussions about patient safety are informed by retrospective data that is reported voluntarily and only detects less than 10 percent of all harm,” said Dr David Classen, chief medical information officer of Pascal Metrics.
“Reducing patient harm must start with clinically reliable data that’s available in real or near-real time, so you can do something about it. This survey shows that healthcare professionals understand the importance of patient safety, but too often lack the tools to effectively measure risk or respond to it in a timely manner.”
Ninety-eight percent of respondents agreed that it would be valuable to have technology that showed them patient harm risks and patterns in near real-time.
Pascal Metrics is addressing this issue with Risk Trigger Monitoring, a clinical software service that automates the detection of comprehensive harm across the hospital, monitoring electronic medical records and other health IT data in real-time with advanced trigger methodologies and reporting back to front-line providers when intervention is required. In early client partners, even severe harm is being documented before clinical teams report through more traditional methods.
Pascal Metrics, PSO, US, Dr David Classen
