Asolva, Inc

Los Angeles, CA

www.asolva.com

a Pendragon Solutions Provider

In a continuous effort to improve patient care, the Kaiser Medication Safety Assessment Team was given the directive of assessing the medication delivery processes at all 27 California medical centers.  The team was given an aggressive schedule to complete the entire assessment within one year. 

For each medical center, the team must survey the facility, compile the data and then write the report.  The survey phase took about 3 days for 6 clinicians, which translated to an effort of 18 man-days.  The average time to compile and write the report was 5 weeks for 2 clinicians, which translated to an effort of 50 man-days.  The total time required to complete one facility was 28 working days, which translated to an effort of 68 man-days.  At such rate, and given 260 working days in a year (not including vacation and holidays), the team would only be able to complete 9 of the 27 medical centers in one year, and would have burned 631 man-days.

The team would have to theoretically triple in size and operate in parallel in order to cover all 27 medical centers within the one year timeframe.  This approach would also triple the staffing cost, and require extra training time to bring new team members up to speed.

Installation:

The solution was to digitize most of the assessment process by replacing all paper surveys with electronic surveys on a Palm handheld device (PDA).  Each of the six team members was equipped with a Palm m500 running Pendragon Forms 3.1.  The paper surveys were converted to electronic surveys on the Palm handheld into which the surveyor taps his/her responses.

When using the customized survey application, the surveyor is guided by the questions on the PDA and selects fields from pre-defined choices or enters free text.  Wherever possible, the surveyor has the ability to select from a drop-down list, checkbox or multiple choice (i.e. Yes/No, Yes/No/N/A) thereby reducing data-entry error.  Comment fields exist to allow for narrative responses.  The PDA survey has intelligence that prompts different questions based on previous responses.

At the end of each day, the PDAs are synchronized to upload the survey responses.  Each PDA is placed on the cradle connected to a traveling laptop connected to the Kaiser Intranet.  At the push of one button on the cradle, the survey responses are transferred to a centralized database.  Immediately, survey summary reports are available for inclusion into the overall report delivered to the medical center leaders.

Forms Development Time:

The actual forms development only took a few days for about seven forms.  That was the easiest part.  The more time-consuming tasks involved deciding what kind of information to capture, how the forms should appear and what subforms to include.

Benefits:

• Convenience—eliminates the need for carrying stacks of paper survey forms

• Reduced errors—eliminates redundant data entry which is error-prone

• Simplified report generation—no need to transcribe data and tally counts; reports are automatically generated based on data collected from Pendragon Forms.

• Structured data—enforce validity of responses to eliminate bad data; the structured questionnaires help new team members gain familiarity with the survey process

• Shorter completion time—reduced the normal 5.5 weeks by half.

Cost savings—the number of clinicians producing the report was reduced from 2 to 1.  Coupled with a shorter completion time, the total effort was reduced from 68 man-days to an average of 38 man-days per medical center.