Ventiv Technology

A BUYER'S GUIDE TO PATIENT SAFETY AND IRM SYSTEMS | 2 PLANNING: IDENTIFYING AND PRIORITIZING THE CAPABILITIES MOST IMPORTANT TO YOUR ORGANIZATION Following is a general list of the capabilities you should consider when planning to procure a patient safety and/or integrated risk management system for your organization. Consider current and future needs carefully and include a wide variety of potential system users in your thought process. Whatever the capabilities your organization prioritizes, it's important that the two systems can communicate with each securely. Many healthcare organizations are limited when they use their patient safety and risk management systems for segmented purposes: for example, patient safety systems for incident analysis and risk systems for claims management. In most cases, the systems don't communicate with each other, which means patient safety managers are in the dark about claim trends and risk managers are unaware of incident patterns. CAPABILITIES FOR BOTH SYSTEMS: » System administration: Including audit trails; controlled access to different parts of the dataset for different users; and module/field customization. » Reporting and distribution: Including electronic distribution of reports, dashboards for key executives and real-time ad hoc analysis. » Enterprise risk management: Including an editable, scalable, distributed risk inventory tool. » User-specific work flows: Including automating specific decision processes or workflows. PATIENT SAFETY CAPABILITIES: » Event reporting and investigation: Ensure that it's fast and easy for your providers to report events in a timely, complete manner. » Root cause analysis: Identify vulnerabilities so you can prevent the recurrence of high-severity, high-probability events. » Patient experience: Beyond documenting the patient experience by soliciting feedback, a system should analyze data to identify trends and opportunities for improvement. IRM CAPABILITIES: » Claim and incident reporting and consolidation: Including level of detail collected and the frequency with which data is updated. » Claim input: Including processes with third parties such as insurers and TPAs and incident information capture. » Exposure details: Including level of detail to be captured and kinds of exposures captured. » Policy information: Including whether you keep both current and historical policy information, and whether the information is searchable. » Global programs: Including programs with sub-coverages or local underlying policies. » Safety and health: Including automating OSHA- required recordkeeping and single-source safety analysis across the enterprise. With all the potential capabilities at your disposal, it's unlikely that any organization will implement them all at once. This means that you will have to prioritize which capabilities are most important, which should wait until later (a year to 18 months is typical), and which are more strategic in nature, meaning that they can wait for a year or more before you deploy them.

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