
While talking to our clients over the past several years, the client services team at PolicyMedical has become intimately familiar with their needs surrounding real-time reporting, an indispensable component of a healthcare organization’s policy management system storing a great deal of data to be compiled and analyzed regularly. You may or may not have a comprehensive policy management in place, but either way today’s article will help you understand the importance of measuring your policy management goals and how you can reach them with an electronic policy management system that provides real-time reporting.
In healthcare, information is key. In policy management systems, this information could include utilization of the system, progress of policy updates, and attainment of long-term education and compliance goals. This information should always be up to date and available instantaneously. Nursing leaders, IT staff, and policy administrators are often the employees that run reports to provide to CEOs and other high-level hospital administrators. With this information, they can make important decisions, as illustrated in the following examples.
Policy Administrators Can Allocate More Personnel Resources
Policy administrator need to know how many policies are up to date and how many are past due. If you have an electronic system like PolicyManager, you can run a real-time report that indicates that how many of the hospital’s policies are more than X years overdue for review. With this information, you can decide to allocate additional personnel resources to work on polices.
Hospital CFOs Can Assess Policy Management Software Utilization
If you are the CFO of a large, multi-site hospital and have recently implemented a new electronic policy management system, you probably want to know if the system is being utilized. You can run a report that indicates how many people are accessing the system on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis, as well as a graph of user access trends. This will give you the confidence you need knowing that your hospital staff are reading policies and have the knowledge necessary to stay compliant.
Education Directors Can Determine If Staff Has Read Policies
Education leaders need to know if all staff members have read the new policy on caring for patients with dementia, for example. Again, with an electronic policy management system, you can run a report to determine which employees have read the new policy, and what percentage of them passed the accompanying quiz. Based on your report, you have the information you need to plan additional training and education sessions surrounding the policy.
Best Practices In Policy Management Reporting
There many real-time reports that can be run within a policy management system. In a system like PolicyManager, there are more than 50 reporting options to choose from. These reports provide very specific details about the utilization of the system. This includes, but is not limited to, a policy inventory, who is working on which policies, the status of all policies, and who has read which policies. The information can be sorted and exported into several different formats. At PolicyMedical, our reporting tool has been the most challenging aspect of the PolicyManager application. Collecting and organizing such a large amount of data instantaneously is no easy feat. However, by talking to our clients about their needs and communicating this information to our Engineering team, we have continuously improved the product, and it is now a point of pride within the application.
By gathering valuable data and presenting it quickly and in an easy to understand format, leaders are able to make important decisions in a timely manner. But don’t take our word for it. Take a look at a demonstration of PolicyManager’s real-time reporting module to see for yourself how critical this feature is to your policy management system by contacting us for a full demonstration. You just might be blown away by all of the new features we added in 2014 and those to come in 2015.