In the healthcare quality space, clinicians must track a plethora of metrics and measures, creating an environment where it can be easy to lose focus of ongoing priorities.
To help center focus and ensure alignment of clinical priorities, Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health developed a quality and safety management system called OnPoint, which is now in place across all of its 17 hospitals.
"It helps us drive those priorities across the organization both with our messaging, and with the workflows or pathways that we create," Patricia Henwood, MD, executive vice president and chief quality officer at Jefferson Health, told Becker's.
The platform is central to strides Jefferson Health has made in managing sepsis in recent years, she said. Since 2021, the system has achieved a 25% reduction in average annual sepsis mortality, which is estimated to have saved the lives of nearly 700 patients and $30 million in costs.
Sepsis remains a critical and costly challenge for health systems across the country, with quality leaders focused on developing new pathways and initiatives to support clinical teams in spotting the condition and intervening as early as possible. In 2021, hospital costs associated with inpatient stays due to sepsis in the U.S. surpassed $52 billion, according to a recent report from HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
"Sepsis can present in so many different ways, and we wanted to think about ways we could bring more attention to the possibility of sepsis for our clinicians, knowing that in the care environment there may be so many considerations coming to mind," Dr. Henwood said.
Sepsis was added as a key priority to the health system's scorecard through the safety management platform in 2022. Since then, Jefferson Health has made gradual improvements in improving outcomes for the complex condition.
A challenge that came with deploying the platform across the system was change management and getting teams to adopt and utilize new tools within it, Dr. Henwood said. To address this, leaders continuously share updates on the effectiveness of new processes, based on patient outcomes.
"We continued to do that with a strong focus early in the point of that change in the pathway so that our teams knew that while it takes a little bit of extra attention to do things differently at the beginning, that we actually were achieving the desired outcomes in identifying more patients with sepsis and making sure we can could expedite their care and improve outcomes," she said.
The health system also convened interdisciplinary councils for each priority area set in the OnPoint platform, including for sepsis, to collect and act on feedback from clinicians. Based on feedback that the tool was often flagging patients who didn't actually have sepsis, leaders refined parameters within the tool to reduce false warnings.
"The cycle of being there to support through change, ensuring that there's data to show the positive impact of the change … and then also willing to ensure that there's iteration and optimization," have been central in driving improvements with the new system, Dr. Henwood said.