You don’t know what you don’t know. This saying rings true for many home-based health care organizations working toward Joint Commission accreditation. Previously, these organizations could only capture their information by manually collecting, organizing and analyzing their own data. Even after completing belaboring manual work, they still had difficulty understanding the totality of the data and how their health care organization compared with others.
The SAFER® (Survey Analysis for Evaluating Risk®) Dashboard, the new data intelligence tool from The Joint Commission, offers health care data management solutions by providing all accreditation data in one convenient place. Additionally, the dashboard highlights the national top 10 industry-wide accreditation-related findings, allowing home-based care providers to better analyze and visualize information.
“The SAFER® Dashboard is part of The Joint Commission’s enterprise data transparency initiative, which we also know as DASH™: Data Analytics for Safe Healthcare,” says Ashley Krueger, director of strategic initiatives and business operations at The Joint Commission. “The dashboard allows Joint Commission-accredited health care organizations to drill down into the data and review various trends across health care organizations.”
A one-stop, on-demand dashboard
While the SAFER® Dashboard reduces or eliminates time that a health care organization spends on manually collecting and analyzing data, it also streamlines overall data processes. Krueger notes that The Joint Commission’s dashboard accounts for organizations that might use multiple data analytics tools — those beyond SAFER® Dashboard — and incorporates a new ability to export the data.
With the SAFER® Dashboard, health care organizations can use the “survey analysis for evaluating risk” tool to realize not just the severity of their risk but also the scope by identifying risks that are widespread across multiple locations.
Benchmarking against competitors
The SAFER® Dashboard allows home-based care organizations to assess their compliance and their industry standing by sharing and comparing top 10 survey findings of their competitors. What’s fascinating and invaluable is that, while a given home-based care organization only participates in survey processes once every three years, the SAFER® Dashboard’s comparison capabilities serve as de facto surveys during survey “off years.”
Access to the SAFER® Dashboard means the ability to track national trends. Even if those trends don’t reflect a facility’s issues, the provided information can still guide that health care organization through its continued pursuit of resources toward long-term compliance and success.
“When leadership is aware of how its health care organization measures up against its peers, it better knows how to direct resources to identified areas within its organization that need support,” Krueger says. “With that insight, home care organizations can work to increase patient quality and safety and proactively prepare themselves for their next successful Joint Commission accreditation survey.”
This article is sponsored by The Joint Commission. To learn more about The SAFER® Dashboard, or about pursuing accreditation with The Joint Commission, reach out to our Business Development team by calling 630-792-5070, emailing [email protected] or visiting www.JointCommission.org.
