Safety incidents in healthcare cause tremendous patient suffering—and they also create major financial and operational consequences for health systems. The challenge is that most organizations don’t have enough time, staff, or resources to fully investigate every incident or near miss. According to August Calhoun, president of North America at RLDatix, a global provider of safety, workforce, and data solutions for healthcare organizations, the key to improving safety isn’t simply reporting more events, it’s treating safety as a data issue.
Calhoun points out that, in addition to tremendous patient suffering caused by incidents, the health care institution suffers serious financial impacts.
“It is really about quality and safety and [while] that’s so important… there are also tremendous financial impacts when something goes wrong,” August Calhoun.
Moving Beyond Incident Reporting
When the sources of a safety incident are revealed, the institution can change processes, education, and referential materials. However, they need a streamlined process with consolidated data in order to do this effectively and efficiently. Calhoun urges them to go far beyond reporting. They need to find out whether their policies are being carried out properly. He calls process improvement a “virtuous cycle.” As part of RLDatix’s broader mission to help health systems improve safety, reduce harm, and learn from incidents across the organization, the company offers technologies to support these best practices.
“At RLDatix, the core mission is around safety, and [we offer] support to help make sure that whether it’s your processes, your education, or referential materials, that you’re leveraging and implementing those processes,” August Calhoun.
The Hidden Cost of Too Many Systems
The interview also explores the proliferation of software systems and the difficulties that this variety produces. Each system and vendor adds to cost and complexity. Extracting data from them becomes, as Calhoun describes it, a “tax on everything you’re doing”—consuming time and resources that could otherwise be spent improving care.
A Platform Approach to Healthcare Operations
This is why RLDatix has worked to build a platform that can serve many purposes in healthcare. Certainly, it can help with your patient safety reporting, tracking, and improvement. However, Calhoun points out that the platform can also reveal connections that allow clients to attract and retain patients and providers. Plus, it can even give providers access to the right data in legacy platforms. By connecting safety, workforce, compliance, and operational data on a single platform, healthcare organizations can gain deeper insights and increasingly apply advanced analytics and AI tools to identify risk trends and improve decision-making.
“We’ve been focused on how we bring a couple dozen different tools together into a single integrated software platform that allows healthcare providers to be more effective in the use of that information and to be more efficient,” August Calhoun.
What Healthcare Leaders Are Saying
Calhoun also shares some details from a recent survey that RLDatix conducted with CHIME members that turned up key provider concerns: too many tools, the difficulty of linking tools together, and the need to make their processes more efficient. It highlighted the need to really modernize healthcare operations.
As Calhoun explains, improving healthcare safety requires more than better reporting—it requires connecting data across systems so organizations can learn from incidents and continuously improve their processes.
Watch our full interview with August Calhoun from RLDatix to learn how healthcare organizations are using integrated data to strengthen patient safety and modernize operations.
Learn more about RLDatix: https://www.rldatix.com/en-nam/
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