Making the Invisible Visible: Clinical Intervention Data

By Clean Hands - Safe Hands

Healthcare organizations are struggling. The transition to value-based care is a financial challenge that has negatively impacted profits, and smaller hospitals are being acquired. Nurse/physician shortages and burnout are making it increasingly difficult to care for patients, even as patient satisfaction is becoming more important.

What if there was a way to reduce costs and improve profitability? What if there was a way to improve clinical workflows and efficiencies? What if doctors and nurses were happier and more likely to stay on the job? There is a way to do all this, and it’s surprisingly straightforward and affordable.

The missing piece of the puzzle up until now has been clinical intervention data, knowing which clinician is in which patient room at what time. There’s a surprising number of benefits in making this previously invisible data visible.

While our core business is hand hygiene and infection prevention, in partnership with our hospital customers, we have found novel uses for our data, including:

Increasing patient satisfaction, by measuring visits. (More about this.)

Reducing shift fatigue, by measuring patient interactions. (More about this.)

Reducing patient falls, by measuring nurse rounding. (More about this.)

Determining whether patients in isolation are visited more or less frequently than typical patients. (More about this.)

Reducing the costs of treating providers, by measuring who had contact with a contagious patient, and how often. (More about Exposure Tracing.)

Identifying whether a patient with an infection caught it in the community or the hospital. (More about Contact Tracing.)

Pinpointing workflow efficiencies, including where and when they happen. (More about this.)

Access to this data has allowed hospitals to see patterns and to uncover where they need to look in order to solve issues. Ultimately, costs have been reduced, efficiencies increased, and both patients and clinicians have been happier.

We’ll be delving into these topics in the coming weeks, and will link to individual blog posts on each topic as they become available. We’re already reducing HAIs; we’re grateful to also be able to help our customers with financial, efficiency and satisfaction challenges.

If you’d like to learn more about how our electronic hand hygiene reminder system decreases HAIs by over 60%, download our free white paper now. Or contact us so we can discuss your hospital’s specific needs.