Everyone knows that having the right staffing levels improves your star rating and the quality of the care you provide. Then why doesn’t everyone do it? The same reasons keep coming up:
- "We can’t find the right people."
- "We can’t keep the right people."
- "We have the right people, but they're doing tasks that don’t improve quality."
What Keeps Nurses from Providing Quality Care?
All three of those are difficult problems for your operations, but let's focus on the last one. Being spread too thin is a problem in many industries, but it's an issue everywhere you turn in senior living. And it's dangerous when it occurs on your nursing staff. If the CFO is spread too thin, they (and their staff) will miss dinner more often. If your nursing staff is spread too thin, mistakes get made, care declines, surveys deteriorate, star ratings go down, and the CFO has to explain all this to their boss and the board. No fun.
To find a solution, start with a root cause analysis.
- What keeps nurses from providing care? (A major reason is busy work.)
- What is the busy work? Paper work—specifically, compiling incident reports.
- Are they analyzing incident reports? Probably not in an in-depth way.
- How valuable is this busy work? Ultimately, it's certainly less valuable than providing quality patient care!
An average senior living facility spends over 450 hours a year compiling incident reports. 450 hours times $20, $30, $40 or $50 per hour (not including benefits) puts the cost per facility at $9,000 to over $20,000 per year.
Defining the Optimal Solution
So what is a realistic solution to allocate nursing resources for improved quality care? A qualified, viable solution would have the following requirements:
- First and foremost, there would be zero facility-side data entry. After an incident form is completed, that's it.
- A solution would have to track frequent fallers, the most common type of serious incident.
- It must help identify other high-risk residents, not just at the unit level—because each unit knows who their high risk residents are—but at the facility or CFO level.
- Any viable solution would have to be QA privileged and secure. Why solve one problem and open yourself up to another one?
- To be valuable, any solution would have to have multiple report views and be customizable so the chief clinical officer and CFO could both pull up a report and virtually have an instant and intuitive understanding of what's going on in their facilities, floors, and shifts for any day of the week or time of day.
- An optimal solution would show trending over time.
- To really allocate nursing resources smartly, you need to send them where they're needed most. An optimal solution would notify you of sentinel events quickly—within 48 hours.
- Realistically, there is a lot going on each and every day in a facility or in a group of ten or twenty facilities. You need to find the actual signal in the noise, and that's tough. An ideal solution would have analytics built in to help identify which incidents pose the greatest potential problem and which residents are at the greatest risk.
The Best System for Improving Nursing Care
Now you may be scratching your head and wondering whether your EHR system can do all that for you. EHRs focus on patient-by-patient care. They're also very complicated pieces of software. You'll need to look elsewhere for the right solution.
QA Reader fits all of the criteria for effectively allocating nursing resources for better quality care. Most importantly, it eliminates incident data entry, provides notifications, reports (actually sweet visualizations), trending and analytics. It is also HUD 232 compliant. On top of that, it flags serious incidents and has them reviewed by industry experts (administrators, DON’s, lawyers, etc.).
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