Does Your Organisation Really Need Patient Safety Software?

June 25, 2020 RLDatix Marketing

Because we are a patient safety software company, our answer to that question is the obvious one: Yes.

But the question we are posing is not rhetorical. There are still many healthcare organisations relying on manual systems and processes to detect and prevent medical errors. Unfortunately, those manual patient safety programs have proven very unreliable in their ability to reduce preventable patient harm.

So, if you are one of those healthcare executives who is on the fence about the need to invest in a patient safety software solution, then this blog is for you. Let’s begin by giving you three compelling reasons why you should fall to the side of investing in technology.

Reason No. 1 is the shift to value-based purchasing, which has made it every healthcare executive’s intense focus to improve outcomes. A colleague of ours who was once a pioneer in the Lean Six Sigma movement once said, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” We hold this to be fact, and, if you do, too, then you know that paper systems can’t stand up to technology for providing the data needed that will enable the identification of root causes.

Paper-based systems may have worked a decade or two ago, but today, learning from the vast amounts of patient safety and quality improvement data being collected by your organisation needs substantial computing power.

Reason No. 2 is your inability to see the forest for the trees. Without patient safety software, you are likely to miss opportunities to reduce medical errors simply because you can’t identify trends in the data. You may have hundreds, if not thousands, of data points – the trees – but collectively, you’re not able to see the meaning behind the totality of the data. Patient safety software not only helps your organisation evolve into a true learning organisation, but also identifies trends in the data that data analysts – no matter how skilled they are at creating Excel pivot tables – simply aren’t able to do.

Reason No. 3 is about alignment – specifically your ability to align he totality of your healthcare metrics that are now at the forefront of the current value-based system. These metrics include not only harm events, but also employee incidents, claims, patient complaints, and more. At a minimum, your patient safety and enterprise risk management solution should include the ability to track, analyse, and find potential issues across the operational spectrum of your organisation.

Still With Us?

If you’ve read this far, then you are probably now wondering what your enterprise solution should exactly do. With more than 3,000 customers in 19 countries around the globe – and a development laboratory that consists of real-world clinical environments – our view on this comes from a place of true expertise – what we have learned from our tens of thousands of users.

To that end, to effectively reduce the frequency and impact of adverse events, patient safety software needs to provide incident reporting, learning, and resolution tools that measurably improve safety, quality, and experience for all stakeholders.

What does this include? Here’s our list of must-haves.

  • Web-based forms, allowing for any staff member to submit an incident report from anywhere at any time.
  • Trending and analysis capabilities, so that you can learn from your data, perform a root cause analysis, craft a performance improvement plan, implement the plan, and collaborate on peer review.
  • Audit trails, so you can easily identify who did what, when.
  • Safety alerts, allowing you to broadcast important safety information around your organisation, tracking receipt of alerts, and monitoring progress in completion of assigned tasks.
  • Real-time problem detection, with active surveillance that enables you to record, manage, and analyse information from across your organisation’s safety and risk areas.
  • Dashboards, that allow users at all levels to easily interpret patient safety data.
  • Robust report capabilities, with the flexibility to produce custom reports appropriately suited to your intended audience.

Why RLDatix Makes Such a Strong Partner

We pride ourselves on being the global leader in risk management technology and improving healthcare safety outcomes. We are 100% focused on healthcare and committed to reducing the frequency and impact of adverse events. As such, our single focus is to provide the tools that allow your organisation to measurably reduce patient harm while improving safety, quality, and experience.

If you are ready to get started, then so are we.

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