How Issue Management Software can Bring a Change in the Healthcare Industry?

With the increased number of births and ageing population in the world, healthcare is booming since the 20th century. Thanks to the health insurance providers, people make healthcare visits more often. On average, 36 Million admissions are made in hospitals across the United States in a year. Maintaining all these patient records manually in a ledger is a time-consuming process and it tends to cause several human errors, unnecessary confusion and even loss of data.

Digitizing all the information related to patients, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, etc., has become a salient feature in the healthcare industry. Many online quality management system software has emerged due to technological advancements, to help the medical sector operate in a digital world. Healthcare systems strive hard to take extreme care of the patients, but some problems may inevitably occur. While many QMS software help the patients and providers upload and retrieve health summary in just a few clicks, there is also a profound need for specific software that addresses patient safety and satisfaction.

Issue management software plays a vital role in a wide range of industries to identify any issue (problem or incident), assign staff for resolution and track the incident until closure.

How Issue management software can bring a change in the Healthcare industry?

In the healthcare sector, a new or returning patient makes an appointment, visits a doctor or a nurse, gets advice on lifestyle changes, picks prescriptions from the pharmacy, gets the blood work done in laboratories and regains the energy back through various procedures.

These steps include but not limited to the following:

• Dealing with healthcare professionals such as doctors, nurse practitioners, front desk staff, lab technician.
• Handling medical equipment.
• Maintaining hospital rooms and facilities.
• Management of biological waste.
• Healthcare Management software maintenance.

What if there is a deviation or disappointment in any of these steps? Where do patients report the abnormality? Can just a phone call complaint solve the issue? Does the healthcare staff sincerely follow up with the patient to make sure that the problem is addressed? Several questions may arise.
All these problems can be easily reported and resolved by using “Issue management software”.

Issue management software provides an online environment to track patient complaints on rude staff, inappropriate medical procedure, unclean facility, concerns of hospital staff, patient safety, equipment maintenance and so on. It raises the value of healthcare sector to the next level because this user-friendly software does the below functionalities:

• Report an issue with the healthcare provider, facility, equipment or even the problem accessing digital patient records.
• Analyze the issue by assigning it to the respective staff.
• Track the incident till closure by continuous real-time updates of the issue status.
• Create a trend analysis and reporting that helps to find out:

1. Which facility has the most problems?
2. What type of incident occurs the most?
3. Is a particular staff being reported frequently that affects patient safety?
4. Which equipment needs maintenance and health check most frequently?
   

Issue management software usually comes with a dashboard where patients or staff can view the incidents at any time. Based on the reports generated, the health organization can spot several problems sooner, brainstorm on improvement solutions. This helps to eradicate frequent issues and raise the quality of medical service provided and hence the hospital rating.

Compliance Management in Healthcare:

While issue management software helps to monitor the quality care provided to patients, healthcare providers should make sure that the software being used is compliant with the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) where proper settings are kept to protect the identity of the patients raising the incidents from being disclosed without their permission.

CaWeb5 Issue Tracking software is a CAPA software provided by Harrington Group International (HGI). They provide end-to-end issue management service to identify, resolve, document and prevent patient and hospital issues, at the same time they make sure that none of the HIPAA standards is breached. They do so by maintaining authentication directories where only authorized users can log in and view the problem records and act upon the solution. Healthcare providers can add documents (containing global healthcare benchmark standards for equipment, troubleshooting, the procedure to resolve patient conflicts) that can be referred anytime during the issue resolution or for future incidents. Not just this, the software also has an email notification option where the patient can get real-time notifications on the status of the problem reported. Pareto, Trend, List and Summary reports on the types of issues can be analyzed anytime by the healthcare organization for continuous improvement.