Patient Safety Newsletter
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Patient Safety Newsletter
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Keeping patients safe: It’s what healthcare providers strive to do every day. Look at any hospital or healthcare organization’s mission statement, and you’ll see that it addresses patient safety in some way—often listing safety as the number-one priority. However, patient safety isn’t just about avoiding errors and incidents to keep patients and staff safe from harm. There’s another side to the story: Patient safety errors can profoundly impact an organization’s financial viability.
Why is this important? At its core, a healthcare organization is a business that, like any other, needs revenue to survive. When a healthcare organization loses money or reimbursement due to fines, lawsuits, or patient leakage, it jeopardizes its ability to stay profitable. Without sufficient revenue, it can’t:
Unfortunately, no healthcare organization is exempt from the financial impact of patient safety errors. All sizes and types of hospitals are affected—including those with the best of intentions that strive to meet patient safety goals.
In the United States, approximately 100,000 people die each year because of medical errors. The annual cost of medical errors to that nation’s healthcare industry is $20 billion. In Canada, one out of every seven Canadian dollars is spent treating the effects of patient harm in healthcare.
There are a variety of ways in which patient safety and related errors can impact a healthcare organization’s revenue stream. Consider the following:
When it comes to patient safety, it truly takes an entire team. That includes people outside of the clinical care team, such as registration staff, coders and billers, clinical documentation improvement staff, and others. Everyone in the organization plays a role in ensuring a safe patient experience.
Each staff member must understand the specific role they play and how their actions can jeopardize or enhance safety. This includes knowing when and how to report incidents—a task that becomes more daunting as an organization’s culture changes through mergers and acquisitions and as new staff are hired. Having the right mix of people, process, and technology can help.
Not surprisingly, several of the World Patient Safety Day goals include the following:
With so much at stake, how can hospitals ensure patient safety while also safeguarding revenue? In a word: Data. Using data to guide real-time improvement empowers healthcare organizations to identify and eliminate the risk of errors before they occur—not retrospectively after a patient has been harmed.
However, maximizing the use of data requires some degree of automation, so actionable insights can rise to the surface. Automation can quicken incident reporting and increase an organization’s ability to trigger immediate action. It can also remind staff members of upcoming compliance deadlines, so organizations are always one step ahead.
Even before the occurrence of COVID-19, many hospitals were operating on razor-thin margins, making them susceptible to the scaling back of services, or even closure. The pandemic only exacerbated the financial strain on many.
Today, hospitals worldwide continue their efforts to make their facilities safer places, by preventing or limiting errors to the extent possible. For all of them, meeting this goal starts with identifying and eliminating areas of potential patient safety risk. A digital quality management system allows organizations to combine all activities aimed at improving quality and safety so they can identify risks and address them holistically.
Learn more about quality management on our special topic page which discusses several important elements of quality management. Or download our eBook to get help writing your internal business case.
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We help healthcare organizations to increase safety for patients, employees and their workplace and to reduce risks. Therefore we develop software to easily collect and analyze quality data and to start and monitor improvement plans.
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