“Our Medication Safety Results have increased 9.5 points in 5 months” Chuck Arrison RPh Director of Pharmacy
Holy Spirit Hospital Camp Hill, Pennsylvania 319 Beds
Case Study – Medication Safety – Patient Safety & Quality:
+9 point Improvement in 5 Months
The Challenge
Management had a high level of urgency regarding measuring and improving medication safety. They identified the need for a process to support the deployment of a culture of constant readiness. It was recognized that the huge volume and disparity of data sources to execute this improvement was a major hurdle to effective implementation.
The Objectives
Holy Spirit Hospital had several goals it wanted to achieve:
- Support a “culture” of Patient Safety and Quality throughout the organization
- Implement a process that was supportive and educational for all staff
- Install a system to easily show trends, celebrate success, and sustain and continue the improvement process
- Create a methodology to focus the organization on performance-improvement priorities
- Design a system that proactively assessed the status of Patient Safety & Quality
- Implement a structured yet flexible approach to ensure that changing needs could be accommodated
- Ensure that any items needing correction were captured and monitored to ensure correction
- Implement dashboards at all levels of organization to communicate results
- Streamline existing processes and eliminate applicative efforts
- Readily demonstrate progress
- Hold managers accountable for ongoing improvement
- Produce consolidated data for regulatory reporting
The Results
- Speed of Deployment: All major modules were deployed in under 2 months.
- Huge Improvement: The first 5 months of the deployment showed a more than 9% increase in Medication Safety results.
- Focus on Top 10: With a dashboard approach designed to focus all management on top failing items, significant gains were quickly realized.
- Dashboards: With department-specific dashboards many managers generated independent action providing significant momentum to improvement.
The Future
- Priority: Continue to reinforce Quality and Safety as a culture of “doing the right things every time” throughout the organization.
- Consistency: Enhance question structure to incorporate Holy Spirit Hospital expectations to further improve the consistency of the process.
- Accountability: With a process that is widely understood, move the emphasis to insisting that manager’s focus on improving their specific areas of responsibility.
- Expansion: Review other rounding/auditing processes for inclusion to reduce duplication of effort.
