Now more than ever, patient safety is a top priority for healthcare professionals. With highly unstable conditions and the recent surge in COVID-19 cases across the U.S., healthcare administrators are struggling to keep tabs on the ever-changing response landscape. The result? A major roadblock in the ability to reduce risks that can affect the quality of patient care.
Impacts of AI-Powered Predictive Analytics for Healthcare Organizations
The current COVID-19 challenges coupled with gaps in longstanding processes require better risk management and patient safety systems. Healthcare professionals must have the ability to capture, track, and analyze data in real-time.
Predictive analytics and data-discovery tools can identify essential hidden patterns and trends. Artificial Intelligence (AI) powers a centralized reporting tool that removes any bias, which enhances decisions and drives operational efficiencies. This benefits patients, employees, and vendors alike.
3 Key Requirements for an Effective Patient Safety Tool
By using these three elements in a patient safety tool, healthcare leaders can elevate care, enhance quality, and reduce risk throughout different phases of the pandemic.
- Advanced Analytics – Through the use of AI and predictive analytics found in risk analytics solutions, healthcare organizations can take big, seemingly random data sets and organize them to uncover hidden patterns and trends (data discovery). The data is then converted into actionable insights based on fact-based queries to identify trends that aren’t influenced by any personal biases. Utilizing AI, patient safety and/or risk management teams can have full insight into key factors before and after an event.
- Event Reporting and Investigation – Without this insight, facilities will have incomplete data sets and be unable to address the root cause of the event. By using a centralized event reporting and investigation tool, healthcare facilities can quickly and easily report incidents in the proper manner, while empowering healthcare organizations to better understand patient safety events, improve the patient experience, and elevate the facility’s patient safety culture.
- Root Cause Analysis and Action Planning – Develop a thorough timeline to explore and display the possible causes of a certain event. This approach allows the investigators and team members to focus on multiple root causes, as there is often more than one root cause that leads to a single incident. This tool also assists with creating data-driven reports based upon root causes, contributing factors, medical records, interviews, and other key information gathered throughout the investigation that enable action plans. This improves an organization’s access to information throughout an investigation, as this information is typically documented on a whiteboard.
Using Data Analytics to Improve Patient Safety in the Future
Moving forward, healthcare organizations must embrace a heightened level of risk management to provide an environment free from harm. To address the new normal conditions, they must embrace patient safety and integrated risk management solutions that allow them to leverage data insights during all phases of the pandemic.
Technology developed with this in mind will provide the ability to break down departmental silos and bring data together. This will help organizations identify opportunities across the continuum of care for improved patient care and response to risks during the uncertain and changing conditions associated with COVID-19.
Next Steps
To learn more about how advanced analytics can prevent patient harm, improve care, and elevate safety, watch this short video.
