Use your EHR to help you improve survey scores
CMS regulations require every senior living facility and nursing home to have a robust quality program to gather data, examine feedback and monitor care quality. Before electronic health records with sophisticated reporting, information was tracked manually, many times with spreadsheets. But today, sophisticated EHR systems can give you the data you need not only for reporting, but also for ongoing monitoring and actionable insights that can help you improve care quality, and ultimately, survey scores. Here are some ways the right EHR can help support your ongoing quality improvement efforts and scores.
Find your survey blind spots
Our industry has become increasingly complex and challenging, which means you can’t simply walk down the hall and look for areas that need improvement. You need to be able to rely on your EHR to do more than simply gather your data. It should have analytical tools to help you understand trends, identify potential opportunities and determine where to focus any needed improvement efforts. You should be able to see where you may be trending toward or falling short of benchmarks or goals. Then, you can use that information to drill deeper to identify system opportunities, check for knowledge or resource gaps, and make changes to training, policies, workflows or other areas needed to close those gaps.
It pays to monitor and address issues before a surveyor is on-site. When you’ve identified an area that needs improvement, gather your team and develop a performance improvement plan, put the plan into action and monitor its success to make sure your changes had the intended effect on care quality. If a surveyor identifies a care event that may not have been intended, you’ll be asked how you identified the issue and assessed the root cause, and whether it was addressed appropriately from a unique patient perspective as well as a systems perspective. A robust EHR, when leveraged appropriately, will contain the data to demonstrate how you identified the issue, document the steps taken to mitigate further risk, and show how you are monitoring success.
Prepare your staff
On its website, CMS shares LTC survey pathways which clearly outline the review and assessment process surveyors are to follow. You can use those checklists to do mock surveys to prepare your staff. This kind of preparation isn’t only about monitoring and correcting—it’s also about education. Your team should understand not just the “what” but also the “why” behind the policies and processes your organization has implemented. Help your staff get familiar with the questions surveyors are likely to ask. They should feel comfortable and confident when responding to surveyors, especially regarding areas where your data shows performance below benchmarks, and where you have implemented systematic improvements, as these areas are likely to be questioned.
Maintaining a culture of safety and compliance is essential. Even when surveyors are not in the building, following established protocols and workflows is crucial. Whether it’s handwashing or medication management, consistency is essential—not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also to ensure surveyors see that you’re following procedures correctly, every time.
Staff preparation shouldn’t be limited to your survey window. Instead, routine, ongoing education should be the norm. Your staff should be in survey-ready mode as much as possible all the time, rather than thinking, “I have to do extra trainings because we are in a survey window or are at high risk for a surveyor visit.” Your culture of quality and continuous improvement should ensure that you have systems in place to routinely monitor your data, providing timely signals of improvement opportunities, which you can then address through an audit-and-improve process and share accordingly. In a perfect world, the healthcare team would view survey preparation as an ongoing, everyday process that’s built into daily workflows, team collaboration and communications.
Configure your software to support better survey results
Every organization has policies and best practices for keeping residents safe, providing person-centered care, and maintaining residents at their optimal level of health. Configure your EHR system to support those workflows so that in cases of staff turnover or the need for agency staff, they’ll have everything they need to meet your care standards and provide the best experience for your residents. Your EHR should drive appropriate workflows that trigger the right decisions at the right time to support your policies, ensuring quality care, and personalizing the care your team is delivering.
Having comprehensive patient information is critical to developing appropriate care plans. For example, if your EHR includes automated tools that help with medication reconciliation during transitions of care, that can take manual steps out of that complex process. Look for a system that can be configured to automatically take in medication orders directly from hospitals for clinician review and decision-making. This allows clinicians to simply review and verify information rather than working from a fax, portals, or secure email attachments to manually input all that data. This helps mitigate risk and reduce errors that can affect resident care, outcomes, quality measures, survey focus and ultimately survey outcomes.
Use data to be proactive instead of retrospective
While MDS data is very important—and is what the CMS system ingests for survey planning–it’s important to keep in mind that MDS reports are retrospective. A good EHR system provides near real-time reports from data. This allow you to be proactive by giving insight into trends or potential issues so you and your team can address them before they become problems.
When you’re designing your system workflows, you can create robust data sets and actionable reports. For example, if you see a trend of increasing infections, you can drill into the data to get to the root cause of why it’s happening. Is it due to a lack of education, failure to follow treatment standards, staffing challenges impacting caregivers’ ability to adhere to practice standards, or issues with family member compliance? Appropriately leveraged data provides actionable reports for your team to get to the root cause and focus on the fix.
There’s no longer any reason to rely on manual tools to track and trend the care your organization provides. A robust EHR system that gives you the data and reporting you need to provide the highest quality of care, and share data with survey teams when appropriate to prove the effectiveness of the care you deliver while helping to reduce the stress of a survey and improve resident outcomes.
Request a demo today for a closer look at MatrixCare.
Allison Rainey
As our Head of Nursing and Clinical Informatics, Allison Rainey oversees the deployment of clinical technologies. As a Registered Nurse and License Family Practitioner, Allison drives a caregiver-first approach in our products, collaborating closely with product leaders to ensures our products and services prioritize the needs and challenges faced by healthcare providers. By aligning workflows, designs, and overall product strategy, Allison strives to offer the most user-friendly, clinically superior, and efficient suite of comprehensive solutions in the industry. Allison brings extensive post-acute care experience from her 20-year tenure at NHC, one the largest publicly traded Senior Care providers in the U.S. She is a seasoned leader in population health management strategy, clinical reporting and analytics development, and inpatient hospital care. In her most recent role as AVP of Clinical Information Technology, she oversaw the deployment and utilization of various clinical technologies, including the MatrixCare EHR, across the extensive NHC network. Allison holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Nursing from the University of Tennessee.
See MatrixCare in action
Start by having a call with one of our experts to see our platform in action.
MatrixCare offers industry-leading software solutions. Thousands of facility-based and home-based care organizations trust us to help them improve efficiency and provide exceptional care.
© 2024 MatrixCare is a registered trademark of MatrixCare. All rights reserved.