HIMSSCast: Improve patient safety and employee retention with incident reporting best practices
Ultimately, improving the quality of care that health systems deliver and preventing harm requires a degree of self-reflection.
Along with digital transformation, implementing an easy-to-use incident reporting system can help healthcare organizations address top patient safety concerns, including medication errors, delays in care, workplace violence and falls prevention, Heidi Raines, founder and CEO of Performance Health Partners, told HIMSSCast.
“Every critical moment is an opportunity to see where things could go wrong,” giving hospitals the chance to fix problems before the next patient arrives.
According to the author of Shared Voices: A Framework for Patient and Employee Safety in Healthcare, technology is essential to improving patient outcomes, but incident reporting can also reduce employee turnover.
When one organization analyzed incident reporting data by shift, the visualizations showed patterns in errors and helped them reduce medication errors by 51%, she said.
Raines explained how pragmatic tactics—like leadership rounding—can also help foster a culture of psychological safety for employees. When leaders empower frontline workers to “invest back” and directly influence quality improvements, they also strengthen employee retention.
Like what you hear? Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play!
Discussion points:
- Complex interactions and building trust in healthcare
- Documenting every dangerous accident to make care safer
- Zoom in on incident reporting trends and eliminate root causes
- Modernizing systems and implementing incident reporting programs
- Culture change and workforce strategies to improve error reporting
- Removing barriers to speaking out and reporting issues easily and quickly
More about this episode:
Questions and Answers: Patient Safety is Based on Data-Driven Leadership
A new approach helps Atrium Health reduce the number of falls – and the costs associated with them
Team nursing can lead to patient mortality and higher costs, study finds
Break through employee resistance with change management
User-friendly EHRs pose serious risks to patient safety