Congratulations to the St. Vincent’s Private Hospital Clinical Pharmacy team who recently won the Acute Hospital 2021 VTE Quality Improvement award at the Inaugural VTE Exemplar Awards. This outstanding achievement places digital tools, such as the VTE prophylaxis dashboard, front and centre in the prevention of venous thromboembolism.
Beating the Block
Hospital-acquired VTE is the most common preventable cause of hospital-associated death with 60% of cases occurring during or within 90 days of hospitalisation. Assessing patients’ risk of VTE and bleeding, and choosing the appropriate thromboprophylaxis for them early in their hospital admission, reduces their risk of developing a blood clot. Recently COVID-19 has also become associated with a high risk of VTE among hospitalised patients, further reinforcing the need for regular monitoring of assessment performance.
Quality Improvement Opportunities
Traditionally, the SVPH Clinical Pharmacy team conducted annual clinical audits on VTE prophylaxis using a paper-based system. Due to a large patient population at high risk of VTE, the process was extremely time-consuming, limiting the team’s ability to audit and identify areas to target for process improvements more frequently.
The SVPH Pharmacy team identified the need for a digital auditing tool to make data collection and analysis quick and easy, enabling them to identify and correct compliance issues in real-time.
Choosing a Digital Auditing Tool for VTE Prophylaxis
Configurability, mobile-readiness and real-time reporting were the main criteria in their search for a digital auditing tool. Scalability was also a key factor with long term visions for a digital auditing app to be used nationwide and data collected into a national system to measure compliance against VTE prophylaxis guidelines.
Using MEG’s configurable Audit & Inspection module, the lead auditor at SVPH worked with MEG’s team to customise the question set, workflow and reporting dashboard to meet the hospital’s requirements. Auditors can breeze through the audit workflow on desktop or mobile devices with easy click, swipe scroll and actions, and by making use of the time saving shortcut buttons. Once a report is submitted, relevant personnel are notified and results can be filtered by date, ward, auditor, speciality etc. to draw out the most meaningful data. As a result,the lead auditor can easily identify areas with lower compliance and formulate action plans to close these gaps in a timely manner.
Improving Patient Outcomes
Since its deployment, MEG has helped SVPH better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the hospital’s performance in carrying out timely and appropriate VTE risk assessment, save time and improve patient safety. The frontline workers now spend less time completing audits and more time on improvement tasks when compared to the legacy system.
Their recent success at the Thrombosis Ireland’s VTE Exemplar Awards is well-deserved recognition and just the beginning for a team who works tirelessly towards making our healthcare system VTE-safe; they hope to assist the national project to improve compliance by seeing the VTE prophylaxis dashboard available in all Irish hospitals one day.
Closing the Loop
Learn more about MEG’s VTE Risk Assessment Audit and how clinical leads and risk owners can manage the process from end-to-end, all from one convenient location.