With ASHRM 2016 only two days away, we thought we’d kick things off with a story that highlights the patient safety journey of one of our clients. Megan Kiser is the Clinical Risk Manager at Primary Health Network located in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Often times, it’s people like Megan who are responsible for pushing new initiatives and processes forward that help keep our hospitals safe.
Here is her journey:
“I actually started my career as a nurse before I transferred into this role. I think being on the front lines, knowing how it feels to be involved in errors or situations, gave me a passion for process improvement and making systems better within the network.”
When I started at Primary Health Network, we were all paper based. Therefore, our event reporting wasn’t as visible within the organization. The other struggle was on the back end of what I was doing, which was trending and reporting to the leaders. Being paper based made this cumbersome. Then, eventually we switched to our own homegrown online system. Again, it was cumbersome because ultimately it didn’t work as we envisioned and had many errors. Probably a good weeks worth of my time was spent on just trying to count reports to make a report to give to management. As an organization we realized, “If it’s not user friendly, people won’t report”. Our front line users’ feedback is what really what led us to looking at solutions.
Previously, the thought of our front line users was that you did a report, it went into this black hole and nothing ever happened. Obviously, their main focus is on the patients; so our education efforts focused on having them see the big picture on how it influences the whole system. Our biggest challenge was to address this barrier. Once front line users understood the “why” behind it and understood how reporting could improve safety, they realized the usefulness of reporting.
I first became aware of RL when I attended the annual ASHRM conference two years ago. I did the demos and it stuck with me. The ease of use, especially how user friendly it was on the frontline staff, and the robust reporting drew us to RL. Previously, we were doing everything manually. Going from counting reports to a click of the button was obviously something that was greatly appreciated.
We’ve come a long way with our risk management program. We’ve had really good reports of near misses and unsafe conditions that led us to look at our processes and take intervention. Our front line users appreciate having the anonymity option with RL. After implementation of RL Solutions we actually saw an increase in reporting. I believe the focus on education and the making of risk management a part of our everyday awareness are things that I am proud of. Everyone always asks me, “Do you miss patient care?” and of course I do miss interacting with patients. But I see it as, I’m able to improve things from a system level and affect more people with the initiatives and things I do.
Are you going to ASHRM 2016? Stop by booth 114 and journey on with RL.
