Health Catalyst introduces comprehensive patient safety surveillance for hospitals and health systems
Health Catalyst launched the Patient Safety Monitor Suite: Surveillance Module, a comprehensive patient safety application to use predictive and text analytics combined with concurrent clinician review of data to monitor, detect, predict, and prevent threats to patient safety before harm can occur.
Tens of thousands of patients die every year in U.S. hospitals due to avoidable errors, according to numerous studies. The Journal of Patient Safety reports that up to 5 million patients per year suffer an avoidable, non-lethal harm event.
The new Surveillance Module, built on the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS), reflects the company’s commitment to improving the safety of America’s hospitals.
To further support hospitals’ patient safety initiatives, Health Catalyst has applied for certification as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), on behalf of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Once listed, the Health Catalyst PSO will create a secure and safe environment where clients can collect and analyze patient safety events to learn and improve, free from fear of litigation.
Today’s standard approach of manual reporting of hospital safety events reportedly finds less than 5% of all-cause harm. This limited approach, based on data that is at least 30 days old, also requires extensive time and resources for data extraction, aggregation, and reporting, resulting in limited root-cause analyses.
Attempts to resolve some of these issues and accelerate patient safety initiatives using an electronic health record (EHR) have been stymied by the technological limitations of EHR software and databases, which provide limited surveillance and embedded AI capabilities. Moreover, because EHRs are considered “discoverable” in litigation, the legal protection afforded by the PSO framework does not apply to them. Because of these limitations, many organizations have adopted patient safety point solutions that focus on specific harms such as falls and hospital-acquired infections. But these, too, miss the mark by failing to facilitate whole-person patient safety and to predict all-cause harm.
Developed over the last two years at a cost exceeding $50 million, the Health Catalyst Surveillance Module solves the challenges confronting today’s patient safety experts. Unlike the standard post-event reporting process, the Surveillance Module is a trigger-based surveillance system, enabled by the unique industry-first technological capabilities of the DOS, including predictive analytic models and AI.
The Surveillance Module quickly identifies patterns of harm and proposes strategies to eliminate patient safety risks and hazards for current and future patients. This potent combination of predictive analytics, text analytics and near real-time data from multiple sources enables the Patient Safety Monitor Suite to predict harm events and trigger a response while the patient is still in the hospital.
In concert with its release of the Surveillance Module, Health Catalyst will offer a breadth of patient safety professional services, including PSO services (e.g., safety data review, vulnerability assessment), “Culture of Safety” assessments and consulting, custom trigger development, outcomes improvement services, and safety collaboratives.
