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The problem: failure to rescue
Two recent studies point to alarming trends in today’s hospitals: 98,000 preventable deaths occur each year due to medical errors alone1 and “failure to rescue” is one of the leading causes of death in today’s hospitals2.
What’s wrong? First, it’s imperative that medical emergency teams come to the aid of patients before a crisis. Studies show that in the 24 hours preceding a clinical crisis, signs of deterioration were not acted upon in 48 percent of cases. Second, hospitals can’t rely on a paper chart for early and rapid care detection and response.
Unfortunately, current tools such as traditional clinical decision support, simple alerting and CPOE have sent the industry down the wrong path towards improved patient safety with minimal or no impact on reducing medical errors.
Hospitals need to build an effective patient safety net with clinical tools that address three critical issues:
- Errors of omission: invisible, hard to recognize,
often unseen errors that result from an action not taken,
- Allocating sufficient resources for 20 percent
of patients needing special attention and,
- Providing clinically relevant, actionable data
in electronic form for proactive surveillance and early intervention.
The solution: proactive, real-time clinical surveillance
CliniComp’s Essentris® OnWatch®tackles underlying patient safety problems.
Essentris OnWatch is an enterprise-wide set of tools that identifies patients whose conditions are in danger of deteriorating, or in clinical decline.
Essentris OnWatch provides actionable data so that the appropriate patients are easily identified and information is specific and focused for effective clinical decision-making.
Essentris OnWatch displays information in real-time, allowing supervisors to quickly assess clinical data and receive early warnings.
- Hospital-wide, to see a big picture
of the trouble spots
- By unit, to scan through patients and
see values that triggered an alert
- By provider, so doctors and nurses can
scan their list of patients and see which have triggered alerts
- By patient, to view all details on a patient’s
current status and previous care
Much more than simple alerting
Essentris OnWatch is an effective clinical tool for identifying potential patient care disasters and empowering rapid-response teams to intervene earlier and more effectively.
For hospitalists, clinical surveillance tools save
an immense amount of time and help prioritize patient care – rather
than relying on rounds or verbal information.
For supervisory staff,
Essentris OnWatch helps create a safety net for patients. Staff can easily see patient “hot spots” and contact physicians proactively.
For hospital management, Essentris OnWatch helps hospitals create “rapid response teams.” Teams can use Essentris OnWatch to identify patients in need and help with resource allocation.
A new path to clinical decision support
Essentris OnWatch blazes a new path towards improved patient safety and effective clinical decision-making.
With Essentris OnWatch, hospital management, caregivers and supervisory staff enjoy a wide range of quantitative and qualitative benefits, including:
- Improved patient
safety: identify potential crises before they occur, rather than
respond to a code/near code.
- Effective resource management: allocate
resources in real-time by assessing staffing and available
beds by unit/department – no
more whole hospital tours.
- Actionable clinical values: view complete
online clinical records to prioritize patient care.
- Sophisticated
alerting: monitor patients for declining clinical trends with
right degree of sensitivity and specificity.
- Increased ROI: discover patient
safety issues early - as a result, decrease length of stay,
reduce costs, and increase staff productivity.
1 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report
2
July 2004 HealthGrades Quality study
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