IntroScout - facing today's healthcare quality challenge
Meeting the demands of patients, payors, regulators, and (most of all) health care professionals themselves for continually improving quality in patient care is a daunting task. Non-clinical realities such as cost control concerns, reporting requirements, and increasing competition combine to make the pursuit of clinical excellence even more challenging.
IntroScout provides healthcare professionals the ability to look inward and observe prescribed and user-defined indicators of patient care with greater insight than ever before. IntroScout allows the organization to collect information to measure, evaluate, and manage the outcomes of those events to enhance patient safety and JCAHO compliance.
IntroScout's robust data repository allows you to collect and report upon results of user-defined indicators to facilitate reporting on JCAHO's core performance measures, IntroScout users can also easily track and report on measures for compliance with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). IntroScout's continuous collection of performance measures provides the insight to simplify accreditation requirements compliance.
Achieving Consistency Through Quality Outcomes Measurement
Outcomes management marries information technology and scientific evidence to produce a rational framework for medical decision-making.
It's difficult to break the outcomes management process down into a list of specific components because these factors can vary from disease to disease and setting to setting. Common features of most programs include:
- Initial identification of therapeutic goals.
- Adoption of practice guidelines, which serve as a framework for improved diagnosis, treatment and patient monitoring.
- Education for patients and the full range of providers to minimize acute episodes of the disease.
- A fully developed information base for review of provider and patient compliance with guidelines.
- Established lines of communication to influence provider and patient behavior.
- Linked information systems that merge medical and drug information with patient and provider profiles in order to analyze program effectiveness.
At present, few if any outcomes management groups have the information technology needed to assimilate all these data sets into an expert system that facilitates unified, coherent analysis. There are simply too many variables involved, and the task of assigning appropriate values to all of them--clinical measurements, satisfaction, quality of life, direct and indirect economic costs--is daunting in itself. In addition, meaningful outcomes analysis requires adjustment of data to reflect severity of illness at baseline; for example, an older, poorer or generally less healthy than average population is bound to have fewer desirable outcomes than a younger population with few poor health habits.
The first step toward achieving consistency is to identify the most salient across-the-board measures for quality outcomes. For instance, while length of stay may be an important outcome to some payers, it's a minor consideration to many practicing doctors. The real issues, which are harder to quantify, are whether patients feel better and regain function or continue to need episodic care for preventable problems.
Root Cause Analysis: A structured, process-focused framework for sentinel event analysis
IntroScout's Root Cause Analysis module provides a communication tool for reviewing, reporting and analysis of causes associated with specific healthcare events. IntroScout manages the event reported, the departments or organizational groups affected, actions taken, and action items for follow-up.
Contributory (root cause) and Noncontributory (proximal cause) Factors Tracked
IntroScout enables you to document and monitor both contributing and non-contributing factors, corrective actions that have been taken and measurements established to monitor success of the corrective action. Root Cause Analysis forms are viewable and provide a reference for JCAHO review and internal improvement in the quality of treatment given for reoccurring events.
Thorough and Credible
The robustness of IntroScout's RCA module allows you to evidence the thoroughness and credibleness of you analyses, including evidence of such factors as:
- Interdisciplinary involvement
- Emphasis on root cause over proximal causes
- Use of process flowcharts
- Recommended corrective actions leading to an action plan
- Identification of action item responsible individual(s) and reporting dates
- Identification of how to measure the impact or effectiveness of the recommended action items
- Responsible follow-through with the action plan
Improve Performance With Teamwork
IntroScout provides a sophisticated web-based performance appraisal module to help you achieve compliance requirements. The appraisal process provides for definition and capture of specific goals and includes measures for monitoring success and tracking improvements. The consistent collection of indicator results allows a measurement both before and after implementation of team recommendations, thus providing quantified evidence of the success of those recommendations.
A Performance Improvement Team manages specific, cross-departmental areas for improving performance in the healthcare organization. IntroScout allows the customer to establish a team and develop a team charter with a defined project scope and relevant performance dimensions:
- Define and capture specific goals and measures for monitoring success and tracking improvements.
- Maintain information on team members and roles.
- Enter meeting notes to provide a centralized location where all team members can review action items and follow the team’s progress.
- Continually collect of indicator results to allow a measurement both before and after implementation of team recommendations, thus providing quantified evidence of the success of those recommendations.