Dignity Health (formerly Catholic Healthcare West)
Since 2008, Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) has encountered a sea of change, including the need to maintain a strong culture of safety—both for patients and employees—in the midst of an economic recession and national healthcare reform.
CHW uses iVOS to track injuries according to codes, which enables CHW to perform meaningful analysis and to target its safety and injury prevention initiatives. Over the past few years, CHW had made great improvements going from an indemnity injury rate of 4.76 per 100 FTEs in 2003 to 1.526 in 2009.
With successful injury prevention initiatives, CHW was able to get the indemnity rate for 2010 down to 1.247, but it found there was still a slight upward trend. To keep their indemnity rate in check, CHW now requires hospitals to complete an employee injury cause analysis form within 45 days of an incident. The analysis involves a thorough investigation of what happened and why. Action plans are developed to correct and prevent future injuries from occurring.
CHW leverages iVOS to not only achieve greater efficiency in managing claims, but to drive incident reporting that improves patient safety and aims to reduce future HPL claims. Using the iVOS Event Management module, CHW employees report any and all incidents with even the potential to cause harm or impact patients. Hospital risk managers are notified when events are reported so they can immediately respond.
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