Performance Improvement
Our primary goal is improved patient care and Performance Improvement and Patient Safety (PIPS) is an integral component of this goal. A circular process, it starts with initial patient care and ends with an improved patient outcome. To this end, we are particularly interested in the broad question of whether performance improvement activities actually improve patient care because that's the question researchers want answered.
Flexible Performance Evaluation:
Our unique approach to data analysis allows you to expand and contract your PIPS focus as your direction changes. This approach provides patient critiques to be automatically generated from your raw patient data.
For example, if you want to evaluate the trauma alert cases that did not have a trauma surgeon arrive within 15 minutes of the notification of patient arrival in the emergency department, TraumaBase will automatically find these patients from within your raw patient data.
If you want to evaluate all the patients who did not go to surgery within 48 hours following a penetrating abdomen wound, TraumaBase will automatically find these patients from within your raw patient data. Therefore, you will not have to develop a new audit each time you are doing patient chart reviews. You can prepare specific forms for PI committee meetings or overall counts of audit occurrences and review processes using all or just part of your active audits.
Answering the Unasked Questions:
Right from the beginning, Clinical Data Management designed databases with the big picture in mind. What questions do we need to answer not just tomorrow but in ten or twenty years?
That's a part of the beauty of TraumaBase. As a relational database, the user can quickly relate one thing to many, which allows you to easily create new audits. In fact, CDM systems are also designed to allow for the flexibility to set up the audit after the fact, or to enter in audits that are not derived form the raw data, such as "Patients whose chart documentation is incomplete".
Our systems come with the unique ability to tag critiques and/or reviews with question codes. These question code programs allow you to easily set up your own survey/questionnaires specifically geared to a critique or review. These questions will then become an integral part of your individually tailored system, which can then be used for custom reporting.
CDM systems’ unique method of developing critiques/audit filters, and review mechanisms is the result of clients’ needs analysis and feedback. Consequently, the tools are in place to assist investigators in developing the information to answer their specific questions.
Performance Review:
How is your facility doing with regard to PIPS? Where can you make improvements and how does the review process directly affect an individual provider and how does an individual provider’s practice compare to it's peers. Answering these questions is the real payoff in using the TraumaBase PIPS/Review process.
A valuable tool with assisting the performance of PIPS duties is the ability to track each review and link that review with audits, actions and dates. Using the tools available in the CDM software, clients are effectively and efficiently able to close the loop, so the likelihood of losing a case and subsequently having a problem occur during a Joint Commission or ACS survey is greatly reduced.
By tracking the review process, the review is complete. It provides you with as many review types and analysis as is needed. Armed with this critical information, the larger picture comes into view! This innovative approach has been used successfully by CDM clients and is highly regarded by many site reviewers.