How a Surgery Center Achieved Streamlined Excellence with PHP [Case Study]
Amidst their state-of-the-art facilities and unwavering commitment to unparalleled patient experiences, Vivere-Audubon Surgery Center faced a...
4 min read
Performance Health Partners
October 27, 2022
The key to improved patient and employee safety is increasing incident and event reporting to collect data to better understand process gaps and root causes of safety events. To ensure employees are engaged in the event reporting process, it’s essential that incident reporting forms be designed effectively.
When designing incident reporting forms, the first goal is for healthcare teams to be able to submit reports with just a few clicks, so that they can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on patient care. One way to accomplish this is by prompting for key details rather than encouraging more open-ended responses.
An empirical study performed by Google of existing user experience guidelines for web form design concluded that improved web forms lead to faster completion times, fewer form submission attempts, and increased user satisfaction. According to the study, a well-designed reporting form meets the following general criteria:
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) developed Common Formats for the reporting and analysis of patient safety data.
AHRQ’s Common Formats are a set of standardized definitions and configurations that make it possible to collect, aggregate, and analyze uniformly structured information about patient safety for local, regional, and national learning.
The Common Formats give providers proven templates and guidelines to improve patient safety and quality within their organizations. The AHRQ Common Formats include the following:
To encourage widespread adoption and learning, AHRQ’s Common Formats are available in the public domain. That said, organizations will want to select events and categories most relevant to their specific needs, many of which may exceed the categories available through AHRQ.
AHRQ Common Formats for Event Reporting (CFER) define three types of events:
To analyze large amounts of data in a meaningful way, incident reporting forms must be built and implemented in a standardized format.
For all events, there are common data points that need to be collected; these detail the type of patient safety concern, the circumstances of the event or unsafe condition, patient information (if applicable), and reporter information.
The following data points are built into every incident report form.
A patient safety committee, risk management, or quality team will determine the most common types of events that occur within an organization.
For example, common incidents and events for an FQHC might include falls, medication, injury, diagnostics, environmental concerns, security issues, compliance, employee safety, and patient relations.
Behavioral health centers might have special categories such as restraint/seclusion, self-harm, and elopement. And LTACs might prioritize infection and pressure ulcers.
Your organization may have all or a handful of common event categories such as:
Each type of event will have a unique question set and specific data points collected to identify trends through the incident reporting form.
It should be noted that no matter how well incident reporting forms are designed, organizations must also position incident reporting in a positive light. They must implement an incident management system by approaching the information collected in a nonpunitive way, essentially adopting a just culture of care.
When used in a setting in which everyone is actively working to support patient and employee safety, incident reporting software promotes accountability and facilitate the journey to zero harm.
Healthcare organizations have traditionally relied on paper-based incident reporting, which makes it difficult to translate fragmented data into meaningful insights for prevention.
Performance Health Partners’ digital incident reporting system was designed to facilitate and expedite the incident management process and comes equipped with incident reporting forms fully customizable to meet the needs of your organization. This equates to streamlined event management and empowers leaders to quickly measure and analyze recurring trends that suggest a course of action for preventing future incidents.
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