Hospitals are loaded down with the latest in health IT and have the bills to prove it. But according to a new survey, they need to invest in specialized technologies to meet patient safety goals, as well as providing more resources and greater organizational focus.
Health Catalyst recently conducted a national survey of physicians, nurses and health executives to gather their thoughts on patient safety issues. Among its main findings was that almost 90% of respondents said that their organizations were seeing success in improving patient safety. However, about the same percentage said there was room for improving patient safety in their organization.
The top obstacle they cited as holding them back from the patient safety goals was having effective information technology, as identified by 30% of respondents. The same number named a lack of technologies offering real-time warnings of possible patient harm.
These were followed by lack of staffing and budget resources (27%), organizational structure, culture priorities (19%), a lack of reimbursement for safety initiatives (10%) and changes in patient population practice setting (9%).
Part of the reason clinicians aren’t getting as much as they’d like from health IT is that many healthcare organizations rely largely on manual methods to track and report safety events.
The top sources of data for patient safety initiatives respondents used for safety initiatives voluntary reporting (82%). Hospital-acquired infection surveys (67%), manual audits (58%) and retrospective coding (29%). Such reporting is typically based on data sets which are at least 30 days old, and what’s more, collecting and analyzing the data can be time and resource-consuming.
Not surprisingly, Health Catalyst is launching new technology designed to address these problems. Its Patient Safety Monitor™ Suite: Surveillance Module uses protective and text analytics, along with concurrent critical reviews of data, to find and prevent patient safety threats before they result in harm.
The announcement also falls in line with the organization’s larger strategic plans, as Health Catalyst has applied to the AHRQ to be certified as a Patient Safety Organization.
The company said that he had spent more than $50 million to create the Surveillance module, whose technology includes the use of predictive analytics models and AI. It expects to add new AI and machine learning capabilities to its technology in the future which will be used to propose strategies to eliminate patient safety risks.
And more is on the way. Health Catalyst is working with its clients to add new features to the Suite including risk prediction, improvement tracking and decision support.
I’m not sure if it’s typical for PSOs to bringing their own specialized software to the job, but either way, it should give Health Catalyst a leg up. I have little doubt that doing better predictive analytics and offering process recommendations would be useful.
