Measuring as the First Step in Creating a Patient Safety Culture

Do your employees feel your organization focuses enough on patient safety? Is creating a safe environment for patients and staff perceived as a high priority by healthcare organizations?

Despite years of investments in clinical training and guidelines, information technology, process redesign, and industry regulations, organizational culture remains one of the key root causes of safety issues. To change this, an organization needs to change its culture to one where every staff member recognizes his or her responsibility to maintain and improve patient safety.

Before organizational culture can be transformed, it must first be understood and confronted. The starting point for change is assessing your safety culture. From this understanding, action can be planned. A patient safety culture assessment is the quickest way to gain the most information about the organization’s current safety culture. The assessment can be leveraged to:

* Identify areas for improvement and raise awareness about patient safety

* Evaluate the impact of patient safety interventions and track changes over time

* Identify barriers to improvement efforts

* Conduct internal and external benchmarking

* Allow employee input into safety improvement efforts

* Fulfill accreditation requirements

Agility Metrics’ Patient Experience Measurement solutions provides you with a “validated” measurement instrument, proven implementation method garnering high response rates, robust data, analysis and actionable reporting to help you identify opportunities to enhance the culture of safety within your organization. Our end-to-end services include: paper questionnaire distribution, online data collection, analysis, benchmarking and reporting as well as pre and post survey communications planning.

The Traditional Healthcare Surveying Dilemma

Up until now, service quality managers have been able to choose between two basic options when gathering patient feedback: Outsourcing Patient Surveying and Do It Yourself Surveying. Each approach has inherent drawbacks that can inhibit CQI.

Outsourcing Patient Surveying

Gathering patient feedback through external surveying firms has a number of shortcomings, including:

• Loss of ownership and control over the process and data by the client
• Unreliable data quality due to delays between the time services are provided and the time feedback is collected
• Inconsistent results due to a lack of standards from one surveying firm to the next
• Inconsistent benchmarking because traditional surveying firms may use proprietary benchmarks
  • Lack of flexibility forcing clients to design quality improvement programs to fit the benchmarking databases of firms and not the indicators required by the client.
  • Questionable or invalid results as survey questions created by surveying firms (or in-house teams) may not have been scientifically validated for relevance, ease of comprehension, thoroughness and clarity
  • Prohibitive cost factors, as high as $40 per respondent.

Cost, above all, is the greatest inhibitor to CQI. Due to cost constraints, health providers using outside firms will survey less often and will not survey as comprehensively or as widely as necessary to produce valid, actionable, ongoing results. Thus, CQI is compromised.

Do-it-yourself Surveying

Surveying managed and executed by healthcare providers requires economies of scale to be cost-effective. Self-managed surveying can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Lacking some form of enabler, such surveying is not only difficult to undertake but can be expensive over the long run.

To produce valid results that effectively facilitate the implementation of CQI, in-house managed surveying programs require specialized expertise, such as:

• Patient satisfaction researchers
• Advanced statistical and analytical knowledge
• Information systems support
• Surveying infrastructure
• Project management capability

For instance, specialized information systems and software are required for the collection, analysis and distribution of information. Some of the common tools used include: off-the-shelf surveying applications, Microsoft Excel, Access, SPSS, SAS, none of which can support the full end-to-end process. In addition, an administrative infrastructure and approach is required for in-house managed surveying. Key administrative elements include:

• Coordination of stakeholder interests and communications
• Survey methodology
• Data sharing and benchmarking strategies
• Archiving strategy
• Management reporting
• Data collection infrastructure

Some larger healthcare providers may have the financial means and resources to implement such an infrastructure, however, most providers do not. Organizations that lack the means to streamline and automate the surveying process will curtail the extent and quality of their surveying, thus inhibiting the effective execution of CQI.

Up until now, choosing between two less than ideal survey options has been a dilemma for healthcare providers. Androfact changes that.