You're required to keep track of adverse events in your communities, but keeping track means different things to different people. Some folks only do what they have to do to meet the minimum standard. Their teams fill out paper incident forms and place them in a file. They might even put the data into their EHR. Usually, teams compile the information periodically—most likely in an Excel spreadsheet—and share it at a quality meeting hopefully on a quarterly basis.
Most communities hate even thinking about adverse events, but the best teams realize incident reports contain a gold mine of valuable data. QA Reader is an adverse event tracking software that turns your incident reports into an insight generator to improve QA and even help prevent incidents before they occur.
Here are four reasons why you need QA Reader.
1) You're sitting on a gold mine of incident management data
The information contained in one run-of-the-mill incident report might not tell you much. A resident fell and bruised her elbow. By itself, that's not particularly noteworthy.
But put all of your incident reports together and you have a gold mine of valuable incident management data. The information contained in those reports can tell you how things are going on individual floors, help you predict which residents will likely experience difficulty in the coming weeks, indicate which communities are a little overwhelmed, and what days of the week or time of day they really struggle.
The information contained in your reports can help you prepare for state surveyors with the push of a button. It can help you direct resources and deliver quality…but only if you can mine the insights contained within.
2) You're wasting serious money on data entry
Most communities compile their incident reports into a spreadsheet, whether they still use paper or electronic incident reports. So you may very well have a nurse doing data entry. How expensive is that? It could be justifiable if the output provides insight, but most likely it's simply just a misallocation of time and talent.
3) You're not getting value from your adverse event data
If you manage multiple communities, getting consistent information into an incident report and into a spreadsheet across multiple communities is really, really difficult. It's hard enough to get one shift on the same floor to be consistent with the prior shift.
But for the sake of discussion, let’s say you get the data onto the forms consistently and then compile the information consistently. Having a nurse do data management is kind of like having your IT guy give you an injection. We love our IT staff, but none of them is giving me an injection!
Discover how one multi-community organization improved their resident outcomes, Quality Measures and star rating with QA Reader.
4) QA Reader can mine your incident data and save you money immediately
QA Reader connects to both paper and EHR reporting processes and gets you and your staff out of compiling data into spreadsheets.
The average community can save over 500 hours per year on data management with QA Reader. What's the average hourly wage of the folks who manage your data?
QA Reader:
- Notifies you and anyone you designate about sentinel events—and YOU define what a sentinel event is to you!
- Helps you identify frequent fallers and other high-risk residents.
- Provides you with interactive dashboards that provide insight and trends for every level of user.
- Helps you get ready for anything by allowing you to download monthly and quarterly summary reports, reports on frequent fallers, and other high-risk resident lists—complete with 90-day fall history.
- Lets you generate incident logs and trends for custom date ranges by community, incident type, injury type, and actions taken.
- Lets you benchmark your communities with each other and with the greater QA Reader universe.
- Helps you meet HUD-232 risk management requirements.
- Is QA privileged and serves as a tool for your QA committee. All comments, data analysis, and reports are protected by QA privilege, provided your committee follows proper guidelines.
- Has real, experienced risk managers providing insight on your sentinel events—which you and your staff can easily view on the dashboard.
Most folks see adverse events as painful, but the best teams see opportunities to mine gold where others see none. Turn your adverse event reporting into gold. Raise quality and improve care with QA Reader.
See for yourself how QA Reader can help you make the most of your adverse events. Request a personalized demo, or download our QA Reader overview.
