NEWS

Quantros Staffing Effectiveness Solution Meets Standards and Gains Praise from Joint Commission Surveyors

When a community hospital in the Southeast heard about Joint Commission's new staffing effectiveness standards, the organization's Joint Commission Coordinaor knew that the data collection and reporting would be hard work and require additional staff: "Meeting Joint Commission's survey requirements would be labor intensive and require staff who are good at statistics. We would have to dedicate at least a 1/2 FTE to this."

Seeking an alternative to the burden of using Excel Spreadsheets, the Joint Commission Coordinator began her search for other options to meet Joint Commission's requirements and power decision support in this area. Because she had used Quantros' real-time, web-based tools to collect data and create reports for the VHA Clinical Affairs project, she requested a demonstration of the Staffing Effectiveness Solution: "Participating in this VHA Pain Management Project convinced us that QUantros would be easy to use and would save us resources."

After viewing an online demonstration of the tool and receiving a proposal, the Joint Commission Coordinator concluded that the HR2.1 Staffing Effectiveness Solution would meet her organization's needs for the Staffing Effectiveness portion of the Joint Commission survey at a fraction of the cost of dedicating full or part-time staff or hiring a consultant.

With only six weeks left before the survey, the Joint Commission Coordinator needed to implement the system immediately. Within hours of licensing the tool, she received access to the HR2.1 Staffing Effectiveness Solution using a secure log-in and password. "After the initial training, using the system was easy," she commented. "This turned out to be very beneficial because the Quality Department and I, after only a short training period, could enter data and then immediately create and print reports to plan for needed changes. Now that the Joint Commission rush is over, we will begin the short training sessions to get all the other departments on board."

The Joint Commission survey team arrived in November 2002, well past the July 1 deadline for hospitals to implement the new staffing effectiveness standards. But the hospital was prepared! Using the tools in conjunction with their staffing effectiveness committee, the hospital had successfully chosen, collected data for and identified PI opportunities from trended and correlated HR and clinical/service indicators representing all of their patient populations. "The surveyors were impressed ... the Quantros tool helped explain staffing effectiveness data from a PI perspective. We were able to identify hospital wide trends and then drill down by department to poinpoint outliers."

Since meeting their Joint Commission survey requirements, the hospital has taken their HR2.1 Staffing Effectiveness efforts to the next level, aided by the tool's easy to use real-time graphing and reporting. "To be able to turn around and have graphs and reports is awesome!" she exclaimed, noting that they have also begun using the tool for executive decision support. "We were about to quantify the risk of not having additional staffing to the administration of the hospital. Doing this in the past has not really been possible on a quantitative basis."

In the end, the QUantros HR2.1 Staffing Effectiveness Solution has saved the organization time, money and effort — giving them decision support and benchmarking capabilities that otherwise would not have been possible. "I don't know what other hospitals are doing without Quantros," said the Joint Commission Coordinator. "The HR2.1 Staffing Effectiveness Solution was an excellent purchase. Well worth the money."

About Quantros

Founded in 1996, Quantros provides real-time knowledge creation solutions for benchmarking, patient safety, accreditation and compliance, and outcomes monitoring for leading healthcare providers, payers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Quantros' web delivered applications provide a standard platform for automating resource intensive manual processes. Through a variety of direct sales and vendor partners, nearly 700 hospitals are licensed to use Quantros' web-based technology solutions.