Written by Colleen Porwoll, Clinical Outcomes Engineer, ABOUT Healthcare
Hospitals are responsible for providing quality care while ensuring the safety of patients. In fact, they can incur financial penalties for failing to meet certain quality and safety metrics. Hospitals are evaluated based on the number of incidents in a specific time frame including patient falls as well as cases of sepsis, pneumonia, surgical infection, or other adverse effects. Worse, these safety and quality issues prevent patients from moving through their care. A situation that is bad for the patient and causes operational and financial challenges for the health system.
Patient safety is a shared commitment rooted in transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement. A strong safety culture encourages open, blame-free communication, daily reporting, and deep dives into harmful events to learn and prevent future occurrences. Recognizing “good catches” and prioritizing care for the sickest patients help identify and address risks early.
For clinical leaders, the challenge is their hospital’s quality and safety performance is being evaluated on retrospective metrics. Data may show your hospital had five falls last month, but if these incidents cannot be tied to specific patients’ scenarios, that data cannot be relied upon to effect meaningful change going forward. You need context; without it, clinical leaders risk making decisions in a vacuum. This lack of visibility can result in poorer patient outcomes.
Huddles Need Help
One of the main vehicles for coordinating patient care to prioritize safety is the patient huddle, a brief meeting among clinicians conducted daily or at the start of each shift and tiered up to leadership. Clinical teams use these huddles to discuss quality and safety concerns, get updates on quality improvement initiatives, and review performance data. If the data being reviewed is only retrospective the information exchanged among huddle participants is often incomplete and anecdotal.
There is a clear and critical need for hospitals to access quality and safety information in real time – while a patient is still in the inpatient bed – to prevent falls, infections, readmissions, and other adverse events that negatively impact clinical outcomes and cause costly delays increasing length of stay.
When hospitals make real-time safety insights available for patient safety huddles, care team members (such as nurses and charge nurses) can make informed decisions about patient care that result in better outcomes. It is important, however, that huddle teams focus on actionable data rather than presenting data for its own sake.
Proactively catching safety issues is critical. Care team gaps and delays in progressing patients can lead to safety issues. These safety issues lead to further delays, causing a downward spiral. Clinicians need visibility in patient huddles to see safety risks before they occur to prevent adverse events to the patient and the health system.
Prioritizing Safety
ABOUT Healthcare is dedicated to providing hospitals and health systems with real-time decisioning tools that raise visibility to the right stakeholders and drive actions that improve both clinical outcomes and operational efficiency. Our AI-enabled solutions bring key metrics – such as patient flow, capacity forecasts, and safety events – directly into huddle discussions, ensuring decisions are informed and proactive.
Hospitals using our platform replace retrospective metrics and deep-dive chart reviews with actionable quality and safety data when they need it. Take the case of a patient who is deteriorating and in danger of getting sepsis, a potentially fatal condition. It is important for the care team to immediately be aware of indicators – such as a declining early-warning score, blood test results showing a low absolute neutrophil count (ANC), or a positive bacterial culture – so an antibiotic can be administered. When minutes can matter in responding to a clinical emergency, the inability to access and share this data in real time can be deadly.
The ABOUT platform ensures clinicians would be aware of these indicators both at the point of care and during huddles. It should be emphasized, though, that our AI-based solution must be augmented with human expertise. While AI may be able to analyze and present valuable clinical data, it is no substitute for the intuitive insights and even gut feeling nurses can have about patients based on years of experience, visual and verbal cues, and constant interactions. AI is a wonderful tool for validating a clinician’s intuition and observations, but it cannot replace human judgment.
Real-time insights can transform patient safety huddles into a powerful tool for improving care delivery and outcomes. By leveraging analytics to streamline workflows and improve accountability, clinical teams can address safety issues before they escalate to keep patients moving through their care. Combining human expertise with real-time technology empowers teams to deliver safer, more efficient, and effective care.
