Peer Review's Role in Safety and Quality

Anjali Arya

As healthcare organizations have embarked on the journey to high reliability, transparency and a critical lens have become increasingly important. Preoccupation with failure and a commitment to resiliency, two principles of high-reliability organizations (HROs), require open learning and communication.

As one of the most common learning strategies in healthcare, peer review processes have also changed. The result is a marked transformation from what was once often an intimidating and punitive process to one that focuses on shared learning rather than individual blame.

According to a Patient Safety Network study on peer review’s impact on quality and safety, “prior studies have found that hospital peer review programs often inhibit safety culture because they are perceived as focusing on punitive actions rather than quality improvement.”

Today, the goal for most organizations is the exact opposite effect. In fact, peer reviews are being included in more spaces than ever before – whether it’s a morbidity and mortality review or expanding clinical reviews to nurses.

Gundersen Health System is just one organization that adjusted its peer review process to focus more on learning and closing the feedback loop to providers. You can learn more about their journey through the on-demand webinar or on the blog.  

Changes like these in organizations across North America have helped transform the conventional notion of peer review and, in turn, the processes and technology that support it.

With the latest version of the RLDatix PeerReview, you now have access to the data and flexibility required to comprehensively support your peer review processes. Improved flexibility means you can easily customize fields, forms and file access levels for your users – to better support the peer review process and maintain security.

Some of the highlights include:

Build your own framework to support and accommodate your organization’s custom needs and blended frameworks. This flexibility caters to personalized workflows to configure the system to your needs as you conduct various peer reviews.

Improved timelines to visually follow the progress of your process. The new timeline allows you to add fields into a timeline event and determine the default sort order (newest or oldest on top). Add attachments to a specific timeline entry. The event attachments panel shows all attachments, allowing you to open them without going to a specific point on the timeline. 

Create customized forms to build in business logic and show the right fields at the right time.

Get more visibility into the success of your peer review process with the new interface. The new look and feel of the tool provide better visibility with an overview of all the important details of the file leading into the investigation. Users can now use the editable tabs to fit their needs.

To learn more about all the latest features of the RLDatix PeerReview and see it – and all the other features of our latest release –  in action, book a demo.

 

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