How do you know if a patient is healthy if you don’t check their vital signs? Healthcare analytics can provide critical insights on improving patient safety in the same way that data helps monitor patient health.
Patient safety is especially important in behavioral health settings where there are large populations of non-compliant patients or patients at risk of elopement, suicide, or self-harm. Healthcare analytics can make these patients’ stays safer, while enhancing the effectiveness of your staff. Here’s how.
What is Healthcare Analytics?
Healthcare analytics refers to the processes and technology involved in measuring and analyzing data in healthcare settings. Analyzing data can drive meaningful insights into the quality of patient care, staffing efficiency, treatment efficacy, and much more. Healthcare data analytics can then be used to predict and prevent risk and sentinel events, thereby creating a safer environment for your patients — and staff.
Applying Healthcare Analytics in Behavioral Health Settings
As a healthcare provider, you know that different types of mental illnesses require different levels of care. And the need for treatment for mental health issues is just as profound as it is for those with physical ailments or diseases.
Healthcare analytics can be used to better monitor and care for patients suffering from illnesses like depression, PTSD, substance abuse, personality disorders, or bipolar disorder. You can apply data analytics to behavioral health patients by doing one or more of the following:
- Measure patient sleep quality
- Monitor how often patient safety checks are completed
- Measure how close in proximity sitters and staff are to at-risk patients
- Chart staff effectiveness, performance, and compliance
Because data analytics gives staff access to real-time performance information, providers can quickly identify where gaps exist and improvements need to be made.
How Can We Improve Patient Safety?
Routine patient safety checks are critical to keeping patients safe in inpatient behavioral health facilities. What’s even more important, though, is ensuring these checks are actually being done. Rounds are often missed due to documentation errors, or simply because of lack of time or reckless neglect. Other times, checks are not compliant because of improper monitoring by staff who aren’t physically close enough to the patients.
Patients go to behavioral health facilities because it’s the best way for them to be safe and receive the care and attention they need. It’s up to the staff of these facilities to ensure they are doing everything they can to provide that level of safety.
Appropriately-timed patient safety checks are a matter of life and death. In fact, 6% of suicides in the U.S. occur in inpatient psychiatric settings — and ObservSMART is doing something about it.
Improve your Healthcare Data Analytics Practices
ObservSMART technology was created to improve patient safety and ensure compliance for patient safety checks. Comfortable, tamper-resistant wristbands worn by behavioral health patients are Bluetooth enabled and sync to staff’s mini iPads. This system verifies proximity-based patient checks are properly executed and contain built-in alerts for a 1:1 observation failure, missed observation, and patient risk and acuity levels.
By using the ObservSMART system, staff have access to detailed reports and healthcare analytics that help inform leadership on how their treatment is going, sleep quality, and staff performance and compliance.
Contact us to learn more about how ObservSMART can fit into your workflow and improve the safety of your behavioral health patients through detailed reporting, alerts, and a higher level of patient observation.