Each clinical pathway has its own set of unique critical points in time that are the most impactful to positive patient care. Providing a streamlined and consistent care model enables healthcare systems to use a value equation that can easily identify these points.
The value equation depicts how positive variations for continuous improvement can be optimized to enhance value-based care models.
Depending on the pathway, it can be the point right after surgery, the 24 hours after treatment, or even at the beginning by identifying a high-risk patient prior to a procedure. It’s the time when a hospital system’s standardized processes are most important. The clinical pathway powered by a robust workflow application will impact the patient length of stay, readmission, and overall patient outcome.
So how are hospitals capturing this time and what are they doing to ensure its being optimized?
In the case of inpatient Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), real-time daily assessment of lab values like BNP, variations in weight, and normal heart rates are all significant decision points for discharge determination. Yet because CHF patients fall into a population with other comorbidities, often times multiple physician inputs can cause protocols to be missed. Are these variations a good thing or a bad thing—and how is this being assessed?
The data from CLARIFIRE for CHF allows you to easily extract data and manipulate it in a meaningful way. This is something that is often reported as a challenge with static EHR systems.
Forget Chart Scouring
EHRs are a critical aspect in our digital age, but they don’t give us direct access to events, trending and standardized workflow. Healthcare providers report that data scouring through charts is messy and time consuming and most often, after the fact.
What you need is complete visibility into the workflow. The ability to trend across patients and physicians when a certain change in process or lack of standardization is impacting a specific patient population (a specific doctor, a type of medicine, etc.), is critical when fast, effective decisions are needed.
This is where the value equation is so important to clinical pathways. The Value Equation illustrates that by adding workflow automation and data synthesis to your standard clinical process, you will gain visibility into both positive and negative variations that will translate into positive, continuous improvement.
Consider Variations
There are variations we can learn from—when something is not a defect in process, but rather an improvement. Are you flexible enough to add this to the process? Do you have enough visibility into the process to recognize the variation?
“With standardization, you have fewer errors … with a set process in place to continually update best practice protocols, it allows everyone to stay current, and it improves efficiency,” says Jonathan Efron, M.D., professor of gastrointestinal surgery with Johns Hopkins Medicine.
By identifying certain documented populations that bring performance metrics down, there’s huge opportunity for improvement. Are there specific patient populations or measures that aren’t necessary anymore?
Controlled flexibility of processes is what drives innovation. The key to the equation is that it encourages incremental growth. By gathering and aggregating inputs from disparate technologies, workflow logic synthesizes decision points to identify risk values in real time.
Ready to try a pathway with workflow for yourself? Get in touch with us today to set up your very own live demonstration with our dedicated team.
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Lauren Walling
Lauren Walling is a graduate of Emory University with a degree in Industrial Psychology, as well as an MBA from the John Sykes School of Business from The University of Tampa. She currently sits on the Board of Fellows at the University of Tampa, and is a member of the Healthcare Business Women's Association, National Association of Professional Women, and the Morton Plant Skip Cline Society. Lauren works with large Healthcare Systems implementing Patient Experience Solutions that streamline processes, increase patient experience and improve quality and safety.
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