AU2018101074A4 - A new centralized and digitized assurance platform specifically for healthcare providers. The platform integrates three distinct modules that cover the full lifecycle of assurance in healthcare; a repository for standards and practice guidelines, an audit system to assess compliance against the standards and an improvement module to address any issues with compliance. - Google Patents

Abstract

This new innovation provides healthcare organisations to manage their assurance program in a centralised single digital system. This new innovation allows healthcare organisations to manage their policies with greater assurance, audit their staff for compliance against these policies and run improvement projects where compliance levels are not appropriate. This has historically been completed with separate systems that do not integrate with each other.

Description

Description A new centralized and digitized assurance platform specifically for healthcare providers. The platform integrates three distinct modules that cover the full lifecycle of assurance in healthcare; a repository for standards and practice guidelines, an audit system to assess compliance against the standards and an improvement module to address any issues with compliance.

This is completed by providing a modular based system providing: A. Policy and practice guideline repository used to house clinical practice guidelines and other non-clinical guidelines across the organisation. i. Version controlled policy management system, allowing healthcare providers to revisit guidelines that were in place at any point in the history of the guideline being loaded in the system. This is particularly important for the review of incidents within an organisation. ii. Policy management system that will accept any file type, audio, video, text, images or any other format can be accepted. iii. An assurance layer for new or amended policy documents to allow the healthcare organisation to distribute to a selected group of end users. Confirmation that the document has been read can be asked for including checkbox, checkbox with username and password confirmation, checkbox, test and username and password confirmation to ensure users have read and understood the policy document. This provides healthcare organisations a level of assurance that their policy documents have been received and understood by the relevant staff groups. B. Inter-rater Reliability module built into the audit platform i. Inter-rater is a module to test and re-test an auditors understanding of audit questions against their own understanding and other auditors interpretation. This ensures that the data being collected by audit staff is a much higher quality. C. Audit Program Based collection of Frontline assurance-based audits. i. An insurance underwriting style digitized audit platform. Allows multiple inputs, parent/child relationships and question weighted scoring. ii. Real-time retrieval of audit data for all completed and partially completed saved audits. iii. Colour coded answer response configuration to improve user experience when entering data. iv. Retrieval of policy document from within the audit to verify specific details of a policy whilst completing an audit. v. Record clinical indicator or national standards such as National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (NSQHS) against individual audit questions, allowing reporting by standard or clinical indicators. D. Real time reporting and alerts system to notify the management team and clinical leaders of high risk items that are identified by the audit process. i. Real time alerts can be completed using a combination of email or SMS.

Alerts are based on question level configuration within the audit system. This ensures that any unsafe clinical practices that are observed during an audit can be brought to the attention of the management team for immediate rectification. E. Advanced Analytics platform i. Fully configurable analytics platform allowing organisations to ingest external data sources such as incident or coded episode of care datasets and compare them to the data created within the audit system. ii. Statistical relationships can be tested and developed allowing organisations to prove the effectiveness of their policies and audit program in relation to patient outcomes. F. Improvement module providing a structured approach to business process improvement. i. Workflow based module ensuring users are following their organisations are following a structured improvement method ii. The improvement module is completely configurable to any improvement method, allowing organisations to manage complex improvement projects and simple ward based improvements. Standard templates for both PDSA and DMAIC are available. iii. Improvement project objectives, initiatives can both be captured and have specific measures allocated to assess the impact of improvement activities.

The improvement module also allocates tasks to users and notifies them of the details, due dates and provides reminders as those dates approach. iv. Launch improvement projects directly from the reporting platform. v. Launch improvement projects directly from an audit. vi. Record Key risk or national standards such as NSQHS standards against individual improvement initiatives. G. Improvement library to catalogue improvements undertaken within the organisation and record the applicable standards that specific improvements are targeting. i. All improvement projects catalogued and stored in repository. NSQHS and other healthcare standards such as Aged Care National Standards or the EQUIP National Standards are recorded against each improvement project. ii. Any standards can be added to the improvement module as a configurable option. iii. Reporting by standard is available allowing organisations to streamline the evidence collection process when preparing for accreditation reviews.

Claims (7)

1. Claim 1 This new innovation provides healthcare organisations to manage their assurance program in a centralised single digital system. This new innovation allows healthcare organisations to manage their policies with greater assurance, audit their staff for compliance against these policies and run improvement projects where compliance levels are not appropriate. This has historically been completed with separate systems that do not integrate with each other.
2. Claim 2 Applying a verification step in the policy module provides healthcare organisations the assurance that clinical staff have received, read and understood new or updated policy documents. This is completed when clinical staff are required to enter their username and password and in some cases complete a test to ensure understanding of the policy. This new innovation keeps a record of who has and has not acknowledged the new or updated policy; providing the healthcare organisation with a much higher level of assurance.
3. Claim 3 This new innovation included alongside the audit tool tests and re-test an auditors understanding of audit questions against their own understanding and other auditors interpretation. This digitises the inter-rater reliability testing and ensures that the data being collected by audit staff is a much higher quality and can be relied upon for decision making. i. By competing an inter-rater assessment prior to completing audits on wards a hospital is able to validate the accuracy of data being collected, one auditor may have a consistent understanding of a policy however when the outcome of this test is compared with other users and the standard it is found that their understanding is consistently incorrect. This would have significant impacts on the quality of data being collected and therefore impact the quality of decisions made when analysing the data. By completing inter-rate reliability testing organisations can identify training needs for auditors. The tool is useful to come back and recalibrate auditors at regular future intervals.
4. Claim 4 This new innovation of including policy and audit in the same integrated digital system allows auditors to access policy documents that are linked to particular audit questions. This ensures that audit staff have immediate access to validate any queries they have in terms of the policy. This provides the healthcare organisation with a higher level of assurance that the auditor’s understanding of policies is consistent and the data being collected is more reliable.
5. Claim 5 This new innovation upgrades a historically weak point in healthcare analytics, moving away from the measurement of averages and into an advanced analytics platform. i. For example audit results showing increased compliance against hand hygiene are historically somewhat useful. By introducing advanced analytics healthcare organisations would be able to compare their audit data with other datasets generated by the organisation. Hand hygiene compliance when correlated against hospital acquired infections tells a much better story about the successful implementation and administration of clinical policies as this looks at how this behaviours is impacting the safety of patients.
6. Claim 6 This new innovation provides real time alerts to the clinical leadership team in healthcare organisations when high risk practices are identified during an audit. An email or SMS alert is triggered and sent to clinical leaders notifying them of the patient details, location and details of the high risk practice; this allows them to quickly respond and rectify the situation. This new innovation will allow the data collected by audit to impact care delivery at the bedside rather than simply providing retrospective data. i. For example a patient is found to have no identification bands on during an audit, the audit is automatically failed and an SMS would be sent to the Nurse Unit Manager to follow up and ensure that the patient’s ID bands are appropriately put in place.
7. Claim 7 This new innovation allows improvement projects to be triggered directly from audits, from the reporting module or by accessing the user menus. The improve module is configurable to any improvement methodology that is being utilised by the healthcare organisation. Baseline measures are captured against all initiatives, ensuring that uncontrolled improvement activities are not putting patients at increased risk. The improvement module allows tasks to be allocated and tracked against individual users driving increased levels of accountability. Each initiative can be linked to a particular standard. i. For example a healthcare organisation may complete an audit focussed on levels of hand hygiene on a ward. An improvement project could be initiated as compliance levels are below expectation. Baseline measures would be taken, initiatives defined, tasks allocated and tracked finally results re-captured to assess the success of the improvement initiatives. ii. The improvement project would be linked to Standard 3 (infection control) in the NSQHS. This then allows the healthcare organisation to report on all improvement activity when preparing for accreditation surveys, significantly reducing the time taken to gather evidence of improvement.