TechSolve Assists Local Hospital Prepare for JCAHO Mandate
Project: The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) placed a mandate for standardized patient care transfers (safe handoff) within hospitals. A local hospital led a Cincinnati initiative to improve patient transfers while preparing for the JCAHO mandate and hired TechSolve to work with the clients’ teams to achieve consensus of goals and refocus the team toward the clients’ perspective. A reliable, value-adding, and efficient process was created. Techniques and challenging metrics were included to enhance root cause analysis.
Results: As a result of the project, TechSolve was able to help the hospital achieve:
- Perfect score for JCAHO mandate for standardized patient care transfers within
- hospitals
- Improved patient care, which equates to improved reliability of standardized patient care
- and less chance of sentential events
- Reduced time, rework, and cost
- Improved employee morale
- Cost savings to medical system of approximately $900,000 per year
The hospital was also able to improving quality by applying process improvement practices:
- Removing holding areas to "just-in-time" transfers, thus reducing errors
- Designing the one-patient flow system
- Replacing check sheets with continuous data, thus saving time and increasing statistical power for prediction
