4 Ways BI Can Help Prevent Harm in Healthcare
As healthcare moves away from the traditional fee-for-service compensation and towards value-based care, preventing harm escalates in importance. Risk surrounds almost every aspect of healthcare, so it can be difficult or confusing to track all patients manually. In addition, it usually results in a reactive care process. With so many potential sources for harm, the question becomes: how can you prevent harm in an efficient and accurate way?
Business intelligence can give you greater insight into your hospital data, and therefore help you more accurately identify ways to reduce harm. Business intelligence allows you to better organize and store information, as well as create alerts when something is potentially wrong. Here are 4 examples of how business intelligence can help your healthcare organization reduce risk by becoming more proactive to potential harm.
Certain drugs, such as Heparin, Coumadin, Epoetin and some antibiotics, can put particular patients at a higher risk for harm. The trouble is figuring out which drugs have the most potential negative side effects for which patients. Business intelligence, if properly collaborated with clinical pharmacists, can create a system for tracking and monitoring patients on high-risk drugs and certain antibiotics. This cuts down on time and effort as instead of manual submissions and analysis, providers monitor patients on these high risk medications by surveilling and trending lab values for slight changes in patient health. These changes which might otherwise go unnoticed will alert pharmacists and clinicians to a potential risk of harm. This implementation transforms to a proactive approach, as the compiled data can mark trends. With business intelligence, hospitals can easily track and catch shifts in patients’ health before it becomes a risk.
The National Healthcare Safety Network and CDC require many safety measures to be in place to protect patients from harm. Most hospitals have “nurse auditors” who manually extract charts post-harm events as well as try to identify “near-misses” or potentials for risk. However, this process takes up valuable time and money, and is largely reactive. As a result, it cannot possibly capture all of the potential risks that exist in a healthcare system.
As healthcare becomes more and more trended towards value-based care, this system is faltering.
