CASE STUDY: Total Transformation of Incident Reporting for Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare

TMH is a 772-bed, non-profit 501(c)(3), multi-specialty academic medical center serving a 17-county region in North Florida and South Georgia, comprised of an acute care hospital, psychiatric hospital, multiple specialty care centers, three residency programs, 23 affiliated physician practices, and other partnerships.

TOTAL REPORTING MODULES   24

TOTAL EVENTS SUBMITTED  100,000+

The Client: Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH) in Tallahassee, Florida, is a 772-bed nonprofit 501(c)(3), multispecialty academic medical center committed to transforming care, advancing health, and improving lives with an ultimate vision of leading the community to be the healthiest in the nation. Serving a 17-county region in North Florida and South Georgia, TMH is comprised of an acute care hospital, a psychiatric hospital, multiple specialty care centers, three residency programs, 23 affiliated physician practices, and partnerships with Doctors’ Memorial Hospital, UF Health and Weems Memorial Hospital.

The Need: Prior to choosing the Healthcare SafetyZone®, this large health system used paper-based methods to gather and report information. With such a system, the gap between gathered information and actionable knowledge was vast. Once TMH began to pursue an electronic solution for its reporting needs, its priorities became clear and very ambitious: namely to find a risk management product that would allow it to transform virtually any information gathering need it might have into a simple, efficient, electronic process that would engage the entire organization in reporting awareness and foster learning that would ultimately impact its entire culture of safety.

“Clarity believes in quality and leadership in risk management. Their expertise goes to the core of the industry. We went with Clarity ultimately because they are a healthcare company and not strictly a software company.”  - Corporate Risk Manager, TMH

The Impact: Related to its primary goal of easier and more efficient reporting of safety events, the initial benefit was clear: reporting time dropped from an average of 20-25 minutes per paper form, to an average of 5-8 minutes per electronic form.

The benefits reached much further than simple reporting times, though; TMH began to look at other ways it could use the SafetyZone. Due to the flexibility of the system, TMH transformed many of its reporting, education, and safety processes into automated electronic processes that could be accessed system-wide.

> Mandatory State Reporting

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) performs annual risk management reviews to ensure that all risk management programs are compliant with statutory regulations. Having the SafetyZone makes it easy for TMH to show how its communications architecture is structured for safety events, and the system’s inboard analytics allow TMH to easily meet the state’s three-calendar-day requirement for risk management review of all safety events.

In another example, TMH must report deaths and other metrics related to state prisoners who come through the organization. By creating a few simple questions on its report forms, TMH is able to track all the metrics required by the state and regularly report those data with very little extra effort.

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