CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT: Hennepin County Medical Center
Emergent Response: Utilizing their Patient Safety and Risk Management System with COVID-19 Efforts on the Frontline
In response to COVID-19, Hennepin County Medical Center saw this pandemic as a patient safety crisis, one which immediately warranted a “disaster management” response from the hospital’s Patient Safety Team.
“Our Patient Safety Team moved quickly to devise a strategy that was two-fold. We wanted to best serve the needs of our patients, while simultaneously ensuring useful information was being captured and analyzed to provide valuable insight into our organization. Having the right information at the right time is crucial to helping support making important decisions” said Gwen VanNess, Hennepin’s Quality and Performance Improvement Data Analyst.
The Hennepin team analyzed what was needed, and moved quickly to devise a new COVID-19 workflow in their trusted MorCare (MCCM) incident and event reporting solution.
Hennepin leveraged the flexibility of MCCM to develop a COVID-19 surge location and created two new ‘Event Types’ in their MCCM incident and event reporting system. A ‘Non-Patient Involved COVID Event’ and a ‘Patient COVID Event’. The ‘Patient COVID Events’ capture delineations and contributing factors that help to provide specific information to assist the Hennepin Patient Safety Team in understanding where safety processes need to be improved, whereas ‘Non-Patient Events’ are being used to track specific concerns with the COVID-19 process as reported by Hennepin team members. For example, these could be breaks in the PPE process, or PPE supply issues, etc. Receiving this information in real-time has proven to be helpful in alerting the Hennepin leadership team to potential issues with their COVID-19 processes, and has enabled them to continuously make improvements
COVID-specific Incident Worklists have been generated and deployed. These assist in a focused effort to review and work these events as a high priority for the organization.
In addition, two separate reports have been developed and are automatically pushed out. These provide timely and actionable information to the Hennepin organization. One report is routed every morning directly to the patient safety team that includes leadership and infection prevention. This report identifies all new COVID-19 patient events reported in the last 24 hours. The second report is sent once a week, showing a rolling two-week trended average on all COVID-19 event reports. According to Hennepin, leadership has responded by applauding the team’s efforts.
We very much admire our Hennepin partners, for their continued innovation and quick to act on creativity as they continue to make strides in supporting the ongoing journey for improved patients and staff safety.
If you’re interested in learning more about our Patient Safety & Risk Management solutions or would like to request a demo, please connect with us for more information or to let us know if we can help.
