A new survey found the majority of healthcare executives — 96 percent — said their hospital uses some kind of clinical surveillance solution, either from a third party, as part of their EHR or a tool created in-house. Four percent said they don’t perform any type of clinical surveillance.
VigiLanz, a clinical surveillance company, commissioned healthcare research firm Sage Growth Partners to survey 100 hospital executives across the U.S. in November 2018. Ninety-four percent of respondents held C-suite positions, such as CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO and CNO. Survey participants came from children’s hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, long-term acute care hospitals, specialty hospitals and short-term acute care hospitals.
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Since the majority of respondents indicated their organization uses clinical surveillance tech, it comes as no surprise that 88 percent said clinical surveillance is extremely, very or moderately important to their organization. Meanwhile, 9 percent said it’s slightly important and 3 percent noted it wasn’t important at all or they didn’t know its importance.
Overall, the executives put a finger on the following five ways clinical surveillance can be most helpful:
- Identifying adverse drug events
- Advancing antimicrobial stewardship initiatives
- Patient safety alerts
- Preventing inpatient infections
- Managing readmissions
Despite the positivity surrounding clinical surveillance tools, the survey found some solutions leave room for improvement. EHRs, for instance, aren’t meeting all hospitals’ clinical surveillance and data analytics needs.
Seventy-one percent of respondents said they invest in extra technologies to help them synthesize and understand EMR clinical data.
Forty percent indicated they use their EHR for clinical data analytics. Of that group, 29 percent said the clinical analytics portion of their EMR works extremely or very well. Forty-nine percent said it works moderately well and 22 percent noted it works slightly well or not well at all.
These EMR inadequacies echo the findings of a 2018 report from Spyglass Consulting Group. The Menlo Park, California organization surveyed 30 clinical informatics leaders at health systems across the country to analyze the clinical surveillance and analytics field.
In a phone interview discussing the report, Spyglass managing director Gregg Malkary noted most hospitals are leveraging their expensive EHRs as an investment in clinical surveillance. But he pointed out that such systems come with their own set of complications.
“The issue with EHR vendors is their tools aren’t considered best of breed,” he said. “Their tools require customization. That’s actually quite problematic.”
The EHR is a good starting point, Malkary noted. But he urged health systems to look at the bigger picture and identify the importance of real-time elements of tools.
Photo: shulz, Getty Images
