Welcome to part 3 of a blog series focused on how high-performing healthcare systems are using clinical process improvement to tackle the common priorities often referred to as the “triple aim + 1” or the “quadruple aim.” The first blog in this series took a high-level look at increasing clinician engagement, delivering quality patient care and containing costs. The second blog focused on clinician engagement and satisfaction. This piece dives deeper into solutions for improving patient quality & safety of care delivery.

Healthcare organizations invest a great deal of time and money to make changes to their electronic health record (EHR) to improve outcomes – such as reductions in sepsis cases, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) and C. diff infection rates – but the process can be time-consuming and the results hard to track. In my former role as Chief Health Information Officer at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, I experienced the frustration of pulling together teams, designing and implementing process controls, then waiting to see if they had the desired effect – but never knowing for sure what exactly was working or why.

Now clinicians and administrators are able to pinpoint areas of concern, take action and analyze results much more quickly. Using LogicStream Health clinical process improvement and control software, leading healthcare systems across the country are making significant improvements in patient safety and quality. The results are having a major impact on care delivery, including 30% reduction in CAUTI rates, 50% reduction in C. diff infection rates, 95% compliance with venous thromboembolism (VTE) bundles, and reductions in sepsis-related length of stay.

How? LogicStream Health software helps healthcare organizations align their EHR content and workflows to reach their desired quality goals by improving, automating and controlling vital clinical processes to deliver better patient care and outcomes in real-time. The LogicStream Health platform layers on top of a health system’s EHR to provide clinicians with self-service tools they can use to simply, quickly and positively impact key clinical processes. Every clinical operator, caregiver, informaticist, analyst and administrator can sort and view real-time data and identify patterns, such as the use of orderables (including medications, procedures and labs) and adoption of best practices. This is the key: Giving clinicians the capability of immediate discovery leads to highly actionable insights for improving patient care.

The LogicStream Health platform allows clinicians to better understand, control, improve and manage vital clinical processes to increase quality and safety by:  

• Assessing care standardization, including clinical workflows and provider behavior, to inform decisions for standardizing prevention efforts related to healthcare-associated infections and other complications that can lead to prolonged hospital stays, increased costs and higher risk of mortality
• Rapidly identifying which clinicians, departments and hospitals are ordering items outside of approved indications
• Measuring utilization by clinician, department and hospital to ensure appropriate ordering and adherence to procedures
• Rapidly assessing documentation around key procedures
• Implementing best-practice protocols
• Measuring results to determine what is working and where further improvements can be made

Instead of guessing at what might work, then submitting report requests and waiting in line for what is often bad data or the wrong data, clinicians can see for themselves where to make changes and analyze the impact in real-time. It’s so refreshing to talk to our customers and hear what a difference this level of efficiency makes for their organization and how much it improves the care they deliver to every patient every day. The results speak for themselves.

In the next blog in this series, I will focus on how healthcare systems are effectively reducing costs through appropriate utilization.

To learn more about one health system's massive reduction in C. diff rates, click the button below to download the case study.