Top 5 reasons you should use a policy management system
1. Document Control
Using a proper electronic policy management system helps your hospital control obsolete, duplicate and unauthorized policies. By using a system that is easy for your staff to use, and by implementing a policy about policy management (eg. only the policy that is housed in the policy management system should be followed by hospital staff), you regain control. Hospital administration and department directors will no longer have to worry about unfortunate, yet common scenarios, such as:
- obsolete policies being followed because they are pinned to a department bulletin board
- staff taking the liberty to write and circulate their own unauthorized policy
- staff inheriting the personal computer of an ex-employee that still has folders of old policies and then putting them into practice
With an easy-to-use policy management system with role-based permissions, your hospital will have ultimate control over policies and procedures.
2. Patient Safety
An obvious and simple benefit. With current and correct policies being published and used by hospital staff, your organization will be doing your part in ensuring that your patients get the best care based on the most current policies and procedures.
3. Increases Compliance
A good policy management system will do two things that both go a long way toward increasing your employees’ compliance to your policies and procedures:
a. It will be as intuitive to use as your organization’s email application. In other words, it will make the job of finding and following a policy easy and painless.
It will generate reports to see who has been accessing policies. It will also have a mechanism to enforce reading the policy, acknowledging that they have been read, and agreeing to abide by it.
4. Lowers Risk
Let’s add on to the previous point, by talking about its incident management and litigation implications. By taking measures to illustrate that your hospital has, in fact, circulated policies to your employees and that they have acknowledged reading and complying to them, you go a long way in protecting your patients in incident management and your organization in litigation charges. With your policy management software, your organization should be able to transparently demonstrate that your staff received the proper education on the policy in question.
5. Smart Money Management
The math is simple here and a fancy ROI (return on investment) calculator is not needed. Depending on your size of your hospital, you might spend anywhere from $10,000-20,000 on a policy management system. It may even take some real convincing to get it into the capital budget request. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Think again. How about we take a look at how much your hospital spends on:
The average percentage full time employees spent managing policies
ii. The amount of paper that is spent printing policies
iii. The loss in reimbursements that may come from potentially losing your accreditation because of poor employee compliance to policies in a patient tracing exercise
iv. The cost of litigation resulting from incidents arising from employees following the wrong policy
This number is well into the six to seven figures per year. Incurring a one-time expenditure will eliminate paper, lower the number of employees needed to manage policies, decrease the time on which employees spend finding policies, make surveys more enjoyable and lower the amount of litigation. All in all, it will leave a lot more liquid cash at the hospital’s disposal.
Best regards,
Saud Juman | President | PolicyMedical™
—
Click here to Subscribe to free RSS updates from “The Patient Safety People”, so that you do not miss out anything that can be valuable to you and your hospital!
OR subscribe via e-mail from the right panel!
Trackbacks