If you have an EHR, you may think you have the data you need for complete QA reporting. But when it comes to QA events, your EHR will likely leave you with questions — not answers — when an incident occurs.
Sure, you’ll have the incident recorded in the system, but your EHR simply isn’t designed to help you improve your quality outcomes. Here’s why your EHR can’t help you with QA reporting.
4 Gaps in Your EHR System
It can’t notify you of serious events automatically
The sooner you know about critical events, the better. Unfortunately, your EHR doesn’t know which events are the most significant to you, and therefore it can’t help you address them quickly. If you’re using an EHR alone, it’ll probably take some time before you’ll see the event in your normal review — and by then, it may be too late to be proactive.
Because each facility’s needs are different, consider the addition of customized alerts for the incidents that need your immediate attention.
EHRs can’t give you a risk manager’s expert advice
When a serious incident occurs, you’ve got important questions. Why did this happen, and what should next steps be? Unfortunately, you won’t know just by looking at your EHR. A risk manager is a valuable resource in these types of situations, because they know the ins and outs of QA for skilled nursing and assisted living facilities. The incident should be quickly routed to an LTC risk manager who can review the issue, guide your investigation, and offer a useful correction plan.
It can’t help you prevent incidents and potential problems
Knowing how to respond to a critical incident is important, but avoiding one is the ultimate goal. The ability to identify your frequent fallers and high-risk residents is an effective way to prevent many negative QA incidents from occurring — and to improve your quality of care and ROI as a result. Your EHR, however, can't identify your highest risk residents, making it difficult to focus on those who need additional care.
It can’t help you understand your facility’s risk and quality metrics
Your EHR has data on critical events, but it’s not designed to be accessed and analyzed for QA reporting. Ideally, what you should be viewing are trends within your facility, benchmarking and compliance reports, and predictive liability analytics. These types of reports can benefit your QA and risk management efforts and help you understand how and where you can improve.
Look for Seamless Integration
Your EHR is a necessary piece of health care incident reporting, but its primary purpose is to store information, not analyze and explain it. You’ll need an additional system to provide you with the QA reporting you need to improve your outcomes. But because staff time is valuable, the best solution is one that doesn’t require duplicate data entry or additional work.
QA Reader takes the data you already enter in the EHR or incident reports and provides you with information and resources designed to improve your quality outcomes and performance.
Next Steps
- Follow us on LinkedIn
- Get more great content — subscribe to our blog
- See QA Reader in action — request a live demo
