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How green is your dashboard? Using the annual evaluation process to make improvements

Hospital Safety Insider, August 16, 2018

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I was recently fielding a question about the required frequencies for hazard surveillance rounds (hint: there are no longer required frequencies—it is expected that each organization will determine how frequency of rounding and effective management of program complement each other) and it prompted me to look at what was left of the back end of the EC chapter (and there really isn’t a lot compared to what was once almost biblical in implication). I think we can agree that there has been a concerted effort over time to enhance/encourage the management of the physical environment as a performance improvement activity (it’s oft been said that the safety committee is among the most important non-medical staff committees in any organization—and even more so if you have physician participation) and there’s been a lot of work on dashboards and scorecards aimed at keeping the physical environment in the PI mix.

But in thinking back to some of the EC scorekeeping documents I’ve reviewed over the years (and this includes annual evaluations of the program), the overarching impression I have is one of a lot of green with a smattering of yellow, with a rather infrequent punctuation of red. Now I “get” that nobody wants to air their dirty laundry, or at least want to control how and where that type of information is disseminated, but I keep coming back to the list of most frequently cited standards and wonder how folks are actually managing the dichotomy of trying to manage an effective program and having a survey (aimed at those imperfections that make us crazy) that flies in the face of a mostly (if not entirely) green report card.

While it’s always a good thing to know where you stand relative to your daily compliance stuff, when it comes down to communication of PI data, it’s not so much about what you’re doing well, but where you need to make improvements. I venture to predict that the time will come when the survey process starts to focus on how improvement opportunities are communicated to leadership and how effective those communications are in actually facilitating improvement. It’s not so much about “blaming” barriers, but rather the facilitation of barrier removal. There will always be barriers to compliance in one form or another; our task is to move our organizations past those barriers. With the amount of data that needs to be managed by organizational leadership, you have to make the most of those opportunities when direct communications are possible/encouraged. And if there are considerations for which the assistance of organizational leadership is indicated, you have a pipeline in place to get that done with the annual evaluation process.

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