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2 4 | 360º Aon eSolutions Industry-wide, hospitals are diligently working to prevent adverse patient events and medical errors. At the same time, employees in the healthcare setting are exposed to significant workplace risks that can also result in serious injuries. "At CHW, we're delivering more services to more patients, and we now employ more people than ever before—all of this equates to a greater risk potential, and it is incumbent upon us as a quality provider and an employer of choice to address and effectively attend to events and claims," said Hillery Trippe, vice president of risk services. Hospital professional liability (HPL) and workers' compensation (WC) claims have the potential to take funds away from CHW 's core mission to provide quality medical care. To help reduce these costs, CHW has leveraged Aon eSolutions' iVOS claims management and event management since 2003. IMPROVING WORKERS' COMP RESULTS Healthcare is a physically demanding work environment, which can lead to slips and falls, overexertion, back and repetitive motion injuries, as well as cumulative trauma. Many injuries occur while transferring and handling patients. And as if these conditions weren't risky enough, injuries from needle-sticks and other types of sharp instruments, put healthcare workers at risk for blood-borne diseases, such as Hepatitis B and C and HIV. Even with all these risk factors, CHW has succeeded in fostering an exemplary level of workplace safety for its employees, which garnered their team the 2005 eodore Roosevelt WC and Disability Management Award. "In 2009, our indemnity injury rate began to creep up—at 1.524 injuries per 100 FTEs. Our goal was to get this rate down 7.5 percent to 1.510," said Rachel Toro, CHW 's WC manager. A key component to prevention is being able to analyze high injury areas. CHW uses iVOS to track injuries according to codes, which enables CHW to perform meaning ful analysis and to target its safety and injury prevention initiatives. Over the past few years, CHW had made great improvements going from an indemnity injury rate of 4.76 per 100 FTEs in 2003 to 1.524 in 2009. "With successful injury prevention initiatives, we were able to get the indemnity rate for 2010 down to 1.247, which is extremely low," said Toro. "However, we found there was still a slight upward trend. To keep our indemnity rate in check, we now require hospitals to complete an 'employee injury cause » Root Cause Analysis."Whenever an incident is reported, iVOS helps us ensure a root cause analysis (RCA) is completed within five days," said Pelletreau. "We log about 30 to 40 RCAs every month, which gives us extensive information to analyze. We share these reports and findings with chief medical officers, chief nurse executives, and hospital risk managers to further improve patient safety." » Visits by Regulatory Agencies. CHW also uses iVOS to assist with tracking mandatory reporting to regulatory agencies. "iVOS tracks when events were reported, and when regulatory agencies will survey hospitals, which helps us ensure we're in compliance with regulators and providing safer care," said Pelletreau. » National Patient Safety Goals. NPSGs were designed by The Joint Commission to help healthcare organizations foster patient safety. There are 10 goals broken down into subgroups, so there's a total of 76 elements. "All of these elements have been preconfigured in iVOS. Results are entered into the system, so leadership can track improvements and ultimately achieve sustainability," said Pelletreau. THE FOLLOWING ARE EXAMPLES OF HOW iVOS HAS BECOME MORE ENTRENCHED IN CHW'S SAFETY PROGRAMS: In this issue, 360º caught up with the executives from Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), a client we profiled in 2008. In three years, CHW has encountered a sea of change. Chief among them is the need to maintain a strong culture of safety— both for patients and employees—in the midst of an economic recession and national healthcare reform. BARBARA PELLETREAU, VICE PRESIDENT OF PATIENT SAFETY Today

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