For my generation (Gen X), the words “inspection” and “audit” may bring to mind someone walking around, clipboard in hand, to ensure everything is being done correctly. Today, a movement is afoot to shelve the clipboard for much more high tech tools like our exam4inspections Salesforce AppExchange app.
Hospitals offer a case-in-point for how these tools can be leveraged to drive adherence to quality standards that improve patient outcomes. But first, let’s talk about why people do inspections at all.
Quite simply, we do inspections because the outcome matters. This includes:
- Infectious disease control programs that help hospitals understand and employ best practices with regard to ensuring patient and caregiver safety
- HQS, UPCS, UPCS-V, and NSPIRE inspections are performed to deliver safer public housing
- School, state, and local environmental health and safety programs help ensure the health and safety of people in municipalities and schools
Essentially, some type of quality check is involved almost any time a good or service that is delivered. In many cases these inspections and audits are a key part of ensuring customer satisfaction, not to mention reducing the costs of delivering products or services that don’t meet the standard. Hence, inspections enable organizations to get the proper return on their investment all the while ensuring course corrections can be made before small issues become big problems. Within a hospital setting, this can even be a matter of life and death. Despite this fact, inspections and audits generally fall under the category of “compliance,” which is traditionally thought of as a cost center.
Amplifying this point, a cost-effectiveness study (conducted in 2015) revealed that: “Annually, approximately 1.7 million patients suffer a health care-associated infection in the United States and nearly 100,000 are estimated to die. The overall direct annual cost of these infections… has been estimated to range from $28 to $45 billion dollars; and health care-associated sepsis and pneumonia are among the most costly in terms of mortality as well as financially.”
These exorbitant costs – both in human lives and dollars spent – make it imperative to create turnkey systems that help organizations rapidly address these challenges.
What is exam4inspections doing about it?
Our team is helping to prevent infections within hospitals by responding to the following pain points:
- Supporting Technology – Goodbye paper, hello technology. Our app – exam4inspections – which is compatible with iOS and Android is built on top of the secure and scalable Salesforce platform and works wherever you are even when you are offline.
- Training and Certifications – A lack of training often means no effective program. Our app includes training and certification capabilities, so that you can scale these programs and manage credentialing and education in-house.
- Business Process Automation– It’s not just the inspection process that needs modernizing. Our app supports the automation and execution of other business processes like cleaning, sterilization, and process execution that occur in the context of infection prevention.
- Assets and Inventory – Effective infection programs need key elements to work right. Our app supports inventory and asset management, which are often critical to infection prevention programs.
- Turnkey Templates and Implementation – I need this now, not next year. Our app includes many of the templates that infection prevention specialists need to hit the ground running – making infection prevention programs easy to onboard.
I want to draw your attention to the last bullet point, in particular. For many key protocols, ExAM4Inspections.com includes pre-built templates, reporting, and business process automation that enable you to simply load the protocol templates, load the reports and configure the appropriate automations. See some examples below:
- Infection control observations
- Sterile processing inspections
- Terminal room cleaning and patient room inspections
- Prevention of ventilator-associated event (VAE) audits
- Prevention of central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) audits
- Prevention of catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) audits
- Terminal room cleaning and patient discharge inspections
- Operating room and patient care area inspections
- Common area and restroom inspections
Combining all of these factors enables us to drive business transformation within the field of infection prevention, alongside our health care partners. Our work with dozens of hospitals across the US has helped us to identify priority areas and tailor our app to achieve success. Not content to sit still, we are continually innovating to meet tomorrow’s needs.
Want to learn more? Get a demo of how we support infection prevention from template customization to deficiency reporting today! Email info@exam4inspections.com or click here to contact us.
