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Healthcare is complex. While many industries have standards of practice for tasks performed, the complexities in healthcare make standardizing competencies challenging. Beyond the differences in medical history from patient to patient and the need for facilities, departments, and teams to have flexibility in how they operate day-to-day, other essential obstacles make standardizing healthcare competency management challenging, including:
- Diverse healthcare workforce: Healthcare involves many professions, including physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, and administrative staff. Each profession has its unique set of competencies, making it difficult to standardize across the entire workforce.
- Evolving healthcare practices: The healthcare field continuously evolves, with new technologies, treatments, and best practices constantly emerging. It can be tough to keep up with these changes and update competencies accordingly.
- Varied healthcare settings: Healthcare is delivered in various settings, including hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, and community-based organizations. Each care setting has its own unique set of competencies that must be considered when creating standardized competency plans.
- Regulatory and accreditation requirements: Different regulatory and accrediting bodies often have their own competency requirements that must be met. These requirements can be difficult to reconcile and may create inconsistencies in the standardization process.
- Stakeholder involvement: Standardizing healthcare competencies requires the involvement of various stakeholders, including healthcare professionals, educators, employers, and regulatory bodies. Coordinating these stakeholders and aligning their interests can be strenuous.
Because healthcare and patient needs are complex, it can be an obstacle to standardizing competencies. Plans must be flexible and meet the needs of the department, care team, and, most importantly, the patient. That’s why Dossier has created an all-in-one digital competency management platform that enables 100% visibility, supports end-to-end management, and provides an easy solution that keeps everyone in every department one step ahead. Learn more about how we can help your organization, schedule a quick demo.
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Contributor: Ryan Owens
PharmD, Editorial Director, Special Publishing American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP)
What we can do to reduce adverse drug events and medical errors.
Despite advancements in healthcare technology and medication safeguards, medical errors continue to occur at a high rate within health systems. A recent study by Bates et al published in the New England Journal of Medicine helped quantify the landscape of medication safety within inpatient sites.1 Bates and colleagues analyzed data from 11 Massachusetts hospitals and over 2,800 random admissions during 2018. Key findings of the study are noted in Figure 1 below.
The most common type of adverse event was an adverse drug event, followed closely by surgical or other procedural events. The authors also found that adverse events were higher among older patients and men. Event rates were noted to be higher among larger hospitals as well.
Figure 1: Key Findings
The study did have some limitations, such as a low population of Medicaid and uninsured patients and study sites limited to one geographic area, which could limit its applicability to other hospitals. However, it is one of the more comprehensive studies to critically examine adverse events from multiple sites as a follow-up to findings from the landmark Harvard Medical Practice Study in 1991.2
The findings of this study indicate that individual hospitals and the healthcare system at-large continue to have room for improvement regarding patient safety and delivery of care. The authors noted a few key elements are essential to help enhance safety standards within an organization and include:
Accurate and appropriate measurement of adverse events for organizations, which can often be complex to achieve, is an initial step to improving safety.
Appropriate safety culture
Dedicated leadership
Regular, ongoing competency training can help staff remain up to date in their knowledge and skills by educating on the latest guidelines and standards of care.
Given the implications to overall patient care, improving safety should be a top priority for organizations. While a multi-targeted approach for improvement should be included, one recommended avenue can be through continuous staff education and training. Regular, ongoing competency-based training can help staff remain up to date in their knowledge and skills by educating on the latest guidelines and standards of care. Examples of potential competency-based training topic areas are included in Figure 2.
Ensuring staff are competent in specific areas related to their roles and responsibilities can help elevate the care provided to patients. Competency-based training also allows staff to receive a refresher on fundamental topics and assimilate new knowledge on changes in treatment recommendations. Training can also be tailored to the specific practice area and individual needs of a staff member.
Figure 1: Competency-based Training Topics
A Whole New View On Competency
Competency-based training can be a valuable tool to not only help improve safety, but also provide continuous professional development for staff. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) have developed a full suite of digital competency trainings and assessments to manage and monitor competency completion among pharmacist and pharmacy technician staff. With Dossier’s robust competency platform and the power of ASHP’s Competency Assessment Centers content, you’ll have the perfect formula for a successful pharmacy.
To learn how ASHP’s Competency Assessment Centers content and Dossier’s competency management tool can help your organization, schedule a quick demo.
References
Bates DW, Levine DM, Salmasian H, et al. The safety of inpatient healthcare. N Engl J Med 2023; 388:142-153.
Brennan TA, Leape LL, Laird NM, et al. Incidence of adverse events and negligence in hospitalized patients — results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study I. N Engl J Med 1991;324:370-376.
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Competency-based training helps healthcare workers achieve the required outcomes for the particular tasks staff are asked to undertake. Competency develops throughout one’s career by way of education, skills training, and experience – but the current process is broken. And Dossier is here to help fix it.
The Healthcare Paper Problem
Quality is a critical element of the care journey. A competent, skilled, knowledgeable healthcare team delivers superior care. However, paper-based competency education and management create opportunities for duplication and make reporting on competency progress, especially across departments, virtually impossible. Additionally, because these blind spots in reporting exist, learners have to re-demonstrate competencies from one department to another due to a lack of inter-departmental transparency.
The Future of Healthcare: Digital Competency Management
Digitizing competency plans such as onboarding, orientation, sign-offs, etc., helps preceptors and healthcare staff work more efficiently and eliminates duplication.
Additionally, departments, facilities, and enterprises shifting to digital competency management can:
Reduce Variability in Care Delivery
Digitizing competencies helps to reduce variability in care delivery because the digital platform allows one plan to be shared with any individual, department, facility, or the entire health system. This consistency in training and development is essential for improving quality. Not only does this minimize the margin of error by way of variations in plans, but it also eliminates duplication of work – helping create more time for training and patients.
Improve Interdepartmental Transparency & Collaboration
A digital competency tool also allows departments to collaborate on plan development and updates, as well as monitor progress.
Scale with Ease
Shifting to digital competency management allows for best-in-class digital practices and provides hospitals and health systems with a scalable tool.
Improve Healthcare Workforce Readiness
Have confidence in knowing your team is ready to respond to any emergency situation at any time because plans can be created, updated, assigned, and shared with individuals, departments, facilities, or the entire enterprise in minutes.
Digitize Your Competency Plans
To maintain or improve quality and patient outcomes, digital competency-based training is necessary. Not only does it support healthcare organizations in the value-based care model, but it also helps to optimize resources and eliminate duplication of work. By digitizing and going paperless, healthcare workers are supported by a system that helps them provide optimum care.
To learn how Dossier’s all-in-one competency management tool can help your organization, schedule a quick demo.
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Healthcare organizations are adopting technologies to improve workflows, efficiency, and patient care, and staff are grateful. One area in need of digitization that would greatly benefit healthcare staff is competency management. Paper-based competency management is a drain on healthcare resources and is contributing to staff stress.
Addressing the Blind Spots in Competency Management
Did you know:
- 20% of the knowledge required by healthcare workers is captured in learning management systems, BUT
- 80% is captured on paper – skills, knowledge, judgment, and decision-making
Paper-based competencies create blind spots, impede reporting, and increase the likelihood of errors by way of missing or incomplete documentation.
Preceptors spend precious time chasing colleagues, binders, and paperwork trying to get an accurate view of progress. The problem is, paperwork is missing, checklist signoffs are incomplete, plans are outdated versions, and no one has the time to hunt down all of the documentation.
Thankfully, there’s a better, more efficient, and more effective way to manage competencies that healthcare staff appreciate.
A Digital Pathway to Improving Staff Satisfaction
Digitizing competency management with Dossier benefits every team member, because it allows for:
Updates to competency plans in real time – no more using personal time to update paperwork; users get a big-picture view of progress; this real-time information exchange allows team members to better manage what’s expected of them
- Better reporting and visibility of progress – real-time reporting for every individual, department, facility, and the whole health system means faster and more accurate data
- In-system reminders for those falling behind – no more chasing down colleagues
- An expedited process for competency management – creation, updates, and assignment of competency plans to people, departments, facilities, or your entire health system can be performed within minutes when you go paperless; no more printing and chasing binders and updates that can take a week or more
The benefits don’t end there. Going digital also helps healthcare workers:
- Get back to the work they love – investing in digital tools helps care teams work efficiently, allowing team members to create more time for patients, for training, or for themselves
- Simplify scheduling – those making schedules see learner progress which makes creating schedules a breeze
- Easily prepare for survey day – reporting to governing bodies becomes easier and less stressful because reports are fully customizable
- Improve the patient experience – while digitizing competencies doesn’t directly impact patients, they do experience benefits such as:
- Happier care team members
- More time with those assigned to their care
- More confident care team members
- Better care delivery
Staff Appreciate Digital Competency Management Tools
With all-in-one competency management tools, from Dossier, staff are empowered and in control of their learning. They see what is required of them at all times. Preceptors have an immediate view of progress. And leadership gains confidence in knowing there won’t be any surprises on survey day.
Patients have high expectations when it comes to the level of care they receive. If staff are hurriedly moving about and seem rushed, patients view the interaction negatively. By helping care teams work more efficiently, staff free up time, and can better meet their patients’ needs.
As healthcare workers continue to be overburdened and overwhelmed amid staffing shortages, equipping them with digital tools that improve efficiency and create more time in their day becomes increasingly important. Explore how Dossier can help your care team.
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Electronic health records were introduced to the U.S. healthcare system in the 1960s. For the first decade, they were mostly used by the government and large healthcare systems. By the 1980s, the software became more affordable, and adoption spread. By the 1990s, the technology could be found in most medical offices. The Internet age elevated the benefits of digital records. Today, EHRs are no longer considered a luxury; they are a medical necessity. The technology has transformed a heavily paper-based system into a paperless one – helping cut costs and improve productivity and efficiency.
The digital age of healthcare has followed three phases:
- Building infrastructure – digitizing patient records
- Interoperability – allowing two or more systems to exchange health information and use the information once it is received
- Cloud-based systems – making medical record-sharing easier and safer, automating backend operations, facilitating the creation and maintenance of telehealth apps, increasing the efficiency of the healthcare industry, and decreasing costs, as well as improving data usage to leverage AI, advancing research, and more.
Cloud-Based Systems + Digitizing Competency Management
Cloud-based systems allow for continuous improvement. For example, patient data can indicate there are opportunities for improvement within a certain procedure. When that data are digitized and accessible, quality can be monitored more closely, and data can be leveraged to improve outcomes and the patient experience.
Digital tools offer numerous benefits to healthcare organizations, the greatest of which are reducing costs and improving healthcare staff productivity. Like with EHRs, digitizing antiquated processes, such as orientation, onboarding, annual mandatories, skills checkoffs, and more, provides a ripple effect – staff become happier, updates become easier, competency tracking is faster, and waste is eliminated.
For those digitizing competency management, Dossier offers:
- Immediate ROI due to eliminated waste and optimizing resources such as time, money, and talent
- Quick, easy implementation in weeks – not months or years
- A dedicated Dossier team member to support you throughout the onboarding process
- Ability to maximize ROI from already acquired learning assets, such as LMS, simulators, procedures, and knowledge databases
The Digital ROI
Unlike the massive financial commitment required by an EHR migration, transitioning to digital competency management comes at a much lower price point. Plus, the return on investment for digitizing competencies begins on day one due to eliminating paper, binders, and storage and improving worker efficiency. When multiple departments use a cloud-based digital competency management platform, savings are compounded.
Implement in Weeks – Not Months or Years
Many software implementation timelines can take 18 months or more because of extensive requirements gathering, systems integration challenges, security concerns, attrition – the list goes on. A cloud-based competency platform, like Dossier, takes the implementation timeline from months or years down to weeks.
There are numerous benefits of using cloud-based systems, including:
- Accessibility – It’s available to staff anywhere at any time.
- Cost Savings – On average, our customers realize immediate cost savings of more than 10x within months of digitizing competencies.
- Insight – Because Dossier connects to your learning systems and activities, you get a better, more comprehensive view of your data and can report on learner progress.
- Increase collaboration – Improved accessibility means preceptors can better manage and engage with those they are training.
- Quality control – It eliminates competency plan duplication or potential differences in competency plans by the department.
- Loss prevention – No more missing binders or misplaced checklists; data lives in the cloud in real-time.
- Automatic software updates – When the system is updated, you gain immediate access to improvements; no more coordinating with internal resources or disruptive downtime.
- Improved staff and patient satisfaction – When staff is properly trained, they deliver better care, and the patient experience improves. When they have access to digital tools that allow them to manage their training and days better, they are happier.
- Scalable and sustainable – Binders require storage space, which isn’t sustainable as hospitals’ needs change. Cloud-based competency management scales easily, a great asset to hospitals undergoing mergers and acquisitions. As part of the M&A due diligence, cloud-based competency management can ensure all individuals, departments, and facilities receive the appropriate competencies.
- Better in-house resource management – As a cloud-based system, your IT team doesn’t need to create bandwidth for a system install. No need to worry about system integrations or security gaps.
A Dedicated Team Member
With Dossier, the resource lift on the customer side is minimized. How? A dedicated Customer Success Manager is assigned to each Dossier engagement. The CSM is responsible for helping clients onboard. All of Dossier’s CSMs have worked or are currently working as nurses in hospitals. Their experience in the field helps ensure customers’ competency plans are set up correctly from day one, and it expedites implementation and onboarding.
Having a dedicated CSM accomplishes three goals:
- Expedites creation of the competency plans
- Gets customer teams in and using the digital platform more quickly
- Generates additional customer savings on day one
Maximize the ROI from Healthcare Learning Activities and Systems
Hospitals and health systems typically have several learning systems that capture data about learner activities. Dossier easily connects to learning systems, adding significant value to current investments while providing visibility and reporting capabilities.
Go Digital with Dossier
Shifting to digital drives immediate savings by eliminating paper, binders, and storage space. Add to that the time saved by improving operational efficiencies, and you can see how the return on investment begins on day one. When cloud-based systems are rolled out across multiple departments and facilities, the savings are immediately compounded.
In an age when healthcare organizations are struggling to contain revenue, delaying digitization becomes a harder argument to make. If you are curious about how much your organization could save, check out our Competency Calculator.
If you are interested in learning more, download Dossier’s Guide to Digital Competency Management.
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Why Healthcare Should Ban Competency Management Binders
Healthcare providers spend considerable time trying to reduce variability in how healthcare is practiced. The goal is to improve the quality of care and patient outcomes. One area of opportunity lies in competency management and shifting to digital.
The challenge: How can healthcare workers successfully reduce variability when competency management continues to be a paper-based process with significant duplication, growing waste, and opportunities for error by way of missing or incomplete documentation?
Healthcare workers are asked to raise the ‘quality’ bar but are not provided the tools they need to do so successfully.
We at Dossier know the importance of digital transformation in healthcare. We’ve experienced the benefits of electronic medical records. However, digital tools that would help healthcare workers meet, if not exceed, their competency requirements are deprioritized, which is surprising because the return on such investments is immediate.
Competency tracking is currently done on paper and housed in three-ring binders. Binders that are shoved in lockers or tote bags across facilities and taken home. This makes updates and reporting time-consuming, stressful, and error-prone – on the best days. There are countless opportunities for these critical documents to be lost, misplaced, or incomplete.
Digital Competency Management: An Immediate Return on Investment
The current process for competency management is a massive resource drain. Time, money, space, and, most important, talent are all wasted. With our competency management software, you can help your facility be as organized and productive as possible.
Signs you need to go paperless:-
Staff are frustrated.
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Preceptors are wasting time that could be spent on training or with patients.
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Leadership can’t access information in a timely manner.
It’s time to invest in digital tools that empower staff and enable them to work more efficiently.
It’s time to ban the binders.
Benefits of Digital Competency Management
“We need things to get easier” is a comment we often hear from healthcare leadership and care team members. Going digital accomplishes that and so much more. Shifting from paper to a digital competency management platform:
- Reduces the variability in the healthcare workforce
- Helps teams deliver exceptional quality and outcomes
- Provides reassurance when scheduling and assigning floating staff
- Allows individuals to see what’s expected of them and self-manage their progress
- Eliminates waste, including paper, binders, storage area
- Eliminates duplication and streamlines paperwork – one system for all documentation and reporting
- Minimizes errors because data is captured at the point of care electronically
- Provides immediate access to real-time data from any device at any time
- Helps manage those falling behind by way of in-system reminders
- Improves efficiencies because every person can see what’s expected of them, and sign-offs become easier and more timely
Going digital helps healthcare organizations and health systems improve their performance on the competency spectrum. Everyone improves when data is available in real-time and staff can immediately see when they are falling behind.
If you’re ready to see what your team could be saving by choosing Dossier’s competency management software, give our Competency Calculator a try or book a 15-minute demo to see the platform in action.
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- January 12, 2023
Dossier + ASHP Launch Only Pharmacy Technician Training Program
PharmTech Ready helps prepare technician workforce, top priority for pharmacy leaders nationwide
Palo Alto, California, January 12, 2023 – To prepare those interested in a pharmacy career, Dossier, a digital competency platform, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) collaborated and have launched PharmTech ReadySM, a pharmacy technician training program.
PharmTech Ready, provides learners with:
- More than 160 hours of entry- and advanced-level content
- More than 70 topics
- Didactic learning requirements and supplemental materials to support all aspects of a technician training program
- Access to exclusive ASHP continuing education, tools, and resources
- Alignment with PTAC accreditation requirements and the ASHP/ACPE Model Curriculum for a Technician Training Program
“PharmTech Ready offers learners access to ASHP’s unparalleled educational content on Dossier’s cutting-edge platform,” said Daniel J. Cobaugh, PharmD, FAACT, DABAT, vice president of publishing at ASHP and editor-in-chief of AJHP. “ASHP is pleased to have launched this comprehensive training solution as part of our longstanding commitment to the recruitment, training, advancement, and retention of pharmacy technicians as we support their essential roles on the healthcare team.”
PharmTech Ready uses the Dossier platform, providing users with a great learning experience and easy, dashboard reporting.
“We’ve been collaborating with ASHP on several initiatives now, and we’re thrilled to be able to develop a resource that meets a critical need in the pharmacy space,” said Roger Lee, COO – U.S., Dossier.
ASHP has 80 years of experience developing and implementing world-class education, content, and practice resources for the pharmacy workforce. This unique position enabled their staff and member to collaborate, marrying excellence in content development capabilities with real-world practice perspectives. For more information about PharmTech Ready, visit ashp.org/pharmtech-ready.
About Dossier
Dossier offers a healthcare competency management platform that provides full visibility and real-time reporting by individual, department, facility, or enterprise. With Dossier, competency plans can be created, updated, and assigned within clicks – giving your team more time, for themselves, for training, and for patients. Healthcare organizations embarking on digital transformations rely on Dossier’s platform to help maximize their return on investment (ROI) from their learning assets because it provides visibility into course completion.
About ASHP
ASHP is the collective voice of pharmacists who serve as patient care providers in hospitals, health systems, ambulatory clinics, and other healthcare settings spanning the full spectrum of medication use. The organization’s more than 60,000 members include pharmacists, student pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians. For 80 years, ASHP has been at the forefront of efforts to improve medication use and enhance patient safety.
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- January 12, 2023
Competency: Is it the Wonder ‘Drug’?
Management Matters
Palo Alto, California, January 12, 2023 – Geir Arnhoff, CEO and co-founder of Dossier, Bari Berger and Iris Meyenburg-Altwarg, managing director at Com-P-Tense Germany GmbH, address the value of competency in modern healthcare. The two-part article explores the link between healthcare professionals’ burnout, morale, and competence level. It considers competence level as the key to improving the quality of care and decreasing staff turnover.
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I am fortunate to meet and work with some really smart and admirable healthcare executives. I recently had the opportunity to speak with one such individual – someone I consider to be very strategic and forward-thinking. We discussed the outlook for 2023. Her priorities and outlook align very well with what we also see at Dossier and with our customers.
There is no doubt that there is a shift occurring in healthcare.
But what are we shifting to?
During the pandemic, we began speaking about ‘the new normal.’ It turned out that the new normal is everything but normal. We’re facing a shifting macro economy, global staff shortages in healthcare, budget constraints, a tripledemic (RSV, flu and COVID – at least for a while) to name just a few of our current obstacles.
The Biggest Healthcare Challenge in 2023
How do we respond and stay agile while learning, improving and staying one step ahead?
Here are four key takeaways from our conversation that I think could be the baseline strategy for a lot of organizations over the next year. If executed properly, they can help combat soaring costs, ease resource pressures and help you better navigate the uncharted waters of the new normal.
Shared Insights: Four Priorities for Organizational Success in Healthcare
- Put quality of care and patient safety as priority number one. That sounds easy, but it means empowering employees to master their professions by having the confidence, focus, and capabilities they need. Now more than ever, leaders need to nurture their teams by being supportive and encouraging focus. 2023 will be the year of core business, removing hurdles, and giving team members the autonomy to focus.
- Digitize at a faster pace so teams can maximize their resources. While digital transformations are occurring in healthcare, the pace at which these transformations are happening needs to escalate. Team members need to modernize how they work, and they can’t do that without digital tools. Everything from virtual care to removing papers and cutting corners by reusing data has accelerated to a speed we never thought possible in the healthcare industry. We cannot slow down. These technology investments need to continue. Incremental improvements have proven to be superior to large-scale tech projects. Organizations need to maintain efforts to modernize their healthcare organizations. Breaking down digital projects into sprints and measuring the ROI of those can be helpful.
- Maximize the value of the tools currently available. We hear a lot of hospitals having thousands of different systems. These system investments can – and should – be maximized. At Dossier, many of our customers have a lot of great systems and resources for learning and professional development. Let 2023 be the year we connect systems to maximize the use and ROI of digital portfolios.
- Celebrate and share successes! All organizations have success stories. Improvements have been made, teams are working smarter – helping the organization move forward. All these activities yield positive outcomes. Those stories should be shared – put them in the spotlight. Doing so is the most cost-effective, fastest, and most powerful way to demonstrate to your staff that you are willing to invest in their needs. It boosts morale, which helps you build a strong team in a challenging time!
Bring it on, 2023! We are ready!
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Authored By:
How technology is reshaping the clinical pathway and redefining the patient experience
The pandemic continues to add pressure to healthcare organizations across the U.S. From increased pricing for drugs and equipment to recruitment challenges to the great resignation, healthcare CFOs, HR and quality managers, and department directors are left wondering if there is an end in sight. Sadly, it may get worse before it gets better.
According to a May 11, 2022 report from McKinsey , the U.S. could see a deficit of 200,000 to 450,000 registered nurses available for direct patient care by 2025 if there are no changes in current care delivery models.
To put that into perspective, McKinsey estimates that for every 1 percent of nurses who leave direct patient care, the shortage worsens by about 30,000 nurses. The impact this will have on care delivery and the patient experience is concerning, especially when considering the aging population.
By 2030, 71 million Americans (about 20% of the U.S. population) will be 65+, a demographic known to have complex health problems, chronic illnesses, and disabilities. If things don’t change in the U.S. healthcare system, there will be more patients than nurses to care for them.
Aggressive international recruiting brings with it its own set of concerns and challenges. It’s a short-term fix to a long-term problem.
While filling the nurse pipeline is one solution, it takes three to four years to train a nurse. The U.S. would need to double the number of new graduates entering and staying in nursing every year for the next three years. The challenge is there aren’t enough nursing programs and educators to handle the influx. An analysis of graduating nurses shows the decline – dropping from an increase of 4 percent in 2019 to only 1 percent in 2020, far short of what’s needed to support our healthcare system.
And that’s just part of the healthcare crisis problem.
The Financial Impact of COVID on Healthcare Organizations
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been more than 97 million COVID-19 cases, 1.06 million deaths, and more than 21 million hospitalizations in the U.S. This has placed an enormous strain on healthcare workers. When combined with rising costs for medications, equipment, etc., these numbers have resulted in billions in lost revenue.
More than 33% of hospitals are operating on negative margins, according to the American Hospital Association.
Many can’t get the nursing staff needed to increase surgeries and cover the budget shortfall. Typically, when there is a staffing shortage, the budget used not paying salaries can be reallocated for increased costs; however, hospitals were paying travel nurses to help address the staffing shortfall.
In 2019, hospitals spent a median of 4.7 percent of their total nurse labor expense for contract travel nurses. That number skyrocketed to 38.6 percent (median) in January 2022. Contract labor rates skyrocketed 213 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels. Medical supplies and drug expenses were up 20.6 and 36.9 percent, respectively.
When considering the financial impact these factors have had on healthcare organizations, it becomes clear that adding headcount isn’t going to fix the problem.
Solutions for the Healthcare Crisis
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation in healthcare translates to the ability to serve patients better digitally. It means adopting technologies to improve workflows, efficiency, and patient care. One area that could easily be improved involves shifting from paper-based competency management (for orientation packets, skills check-offs, and annual mandatories to name a few) to a digital competency management platform.
Only 20 percent of what staff needs to know is captured in learning management systems. The other 80 percent is competencies – knowledge, skills, judgment, and behaviors. Information that is critical to their roles, but currently captured on paper and stored in three-ring binders. This paper-based approach creates enormous waste and inefficiencies, further draining healthcare resources.
Antiquated Processes Hemorrhage Resources
Consider the waste in paper-based competency management:
- Wasted time
- Chasing papers and/or redoing lost paperwork
- Updating competency plans for individuals, departments and facilities, and the time spent printing out plan changes and updating binders – hours upon hours of time when hundreds of staff are involved
- Cost of paper, binders, storage areas
- Duplication of competencies from one department to another because of the lack of visibility
- Inability for those onboarding or going through training to easily and clearly see where they are in the process, what’s required of them, etc.
In the current paper-based competency management environment, when changes are needed, time is spent going into each individual’s plan, making changes, printing the changes, finding the staff member, finding the person’s binder, switching out the plans, putting the binder back, etc. When you multiply the time spent doing this by the number of staff members involved, the need to go digital becomes clear.
The Care Team of the Future
To improve patient outcomes by delivering better quality and focusing on safety, schedulers need to know and be able to track that team members have the skills, knowledge, judgment, and behaviors required for what’s expected of them. And they need that information at their fingertips – not spread across a hospital in lockers, on desks, and in storage rooms.
When plans are digital:
- Plans are created and pushed to appropriate staff in minutes
- Updates happen with a few clicks
- Reminders are easily sent to those falling behind
- Reports for regulatory agencies occur in real time
If you are ready for the next step, request a 15-minute meeting.
- Wasted time
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