High Reliability Healthcare
Despite thoughtful and valiant efforts to improve the quality of health care, many patients still suffer preventable harm every day. Hospitals find improvement difficult to sustain and suffer improvement fatigue since so many issues that cause harm need attention. To date, hospitals and health systems have been unable to master reliable excellence across their entire institutions, and for the areas that they have, most fail to maintain that mastery over long periods of time.
This data is then viewed by health professionals in remote facilities such as monitoring centers in primary care settings, hospitals, intensive care units, skilled nursing facilities, and centralized off-site case management programs. Health professionals monitor these patients remotely and act on the information received as part of the treatment plan.
High Reliability Healthcare Science
High-reliability science is the study of organizations in industries like commercial aviation and nuclear power that operate under hazardous conditions while maintaining safety levels that are far better than those of health care. Adapting and applying the lessons of this science to health care is called High Reliability Healthcare and offers the promise of enabling hospitals to reach levels of quality and safety that are comparable to those of the best high-reliability organizations.
In order to achieve high reliability healthcare, an organization requires three fundamental underlying support systems or pillars:
• Access to consistent and conscientious use of an improvement process
• A Culture of Patient Safety that permeates all levels of the organization
• Radical commitment to Teamwork
Current Industry Trends in High Reliability Healthcare
In the United States the healthcare industry has shifted from a provider-controlled culture to a consumer-driven model. This has revealed the need to raise the bar on reliability for both quality and patient safety. Because of the enormous dollars spent on healthcare, and because quality outcomes are below the standards expected in a developed country, patients and payers have begun to question the value they’re receiving. As a result, the industry is undergoing a shift away from fee-for-service to value-based payment models. Payment models such as pay-for-performance and at-risk models have become more common. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Value-Based Purchasing program is a good example of this. This payment model supports a move away from incenting only for quantity and moves toward incentive for quality, efficiency, and reduced costs. In these at-risk models, payment is built on the expected cost of care to treat a condition for an entire patient population. Making the financial success of a health system more dependent on it’s the ability to manage quality and control costs is forcing health systems and hospitals to drive towards high reliability healthcare.
Go Beyond Industry Standards for High Reliability Healthcare with AWARE Critical Care
AWARE Critical Care is an FDA cleared and CE Marking certified clinical analytics system that reduces information overload by using clinically proven analytics to focus on patient data relevant to the current situation and provide timely, actionable information. Created by clinicians for clinicians, AWARE Critical Care clearly and concisely presents actionable information to all care team members to reduce errors, speed decision making, improve patient outcomes, reduce the cost of care, and support best-care practices across entire health systems. Because of the consistency of AWARE’s automation and driving reductions in errors, missed therapies it allows for a culture of safety that drives high reliability healthcare through situational awareness.
