When it comes to providing excellent health care, the quality and timeliness of data available to care providers and leadership is critical.
Senior Operations Engineer Robby Chen noticed an opportunity to use patient data in a more timely and useful manner, and he set out to find a new way of doing things.
“With the old system, when a site would need information they would send a request in and an analyst would manually compile the data and send it back,” Robby explains. This could sometimes take weeks, and by that time, the data may be outdated. Consequently, this decreased the perception of trust in the validity and reliability of this information for identifying learning opportunities and quality improvement strategies.
"We wanted to see how we could address this issue, improve efficiency and save everyone some time,” Robby says.
Subsequently, he took the initiative to meet with different hospital sites to understand their concerns and gather feedback. He then pulled together partners from across the organization: the Clinical Quality and Patient Safety team, regional clinical nurse educators and the Patient Safety Priorities teams from the sites. He worked to identify what metrics would be most useful for care providers and leadership and to find the best way to convey the information.
“Robby visualized a space for engagement where others had not,” Clinical Nurse Specialist Deb Ram-Ditta says. “He is authentic in his ability to listen, and recognizes the importance of bridging the gaps between the ways the metrics are reported.”
Out of these conversations, Robby led the development of a new tool, the myPSP Dashboard. This online tool is a ‘self-serve’ dashboard that allows users to access real-time data about the six patient safety priorities. In addition to eliminating wait-times to receive data for certain metrics, the dashboard helps bring context to the numbers to help employees and leaders better understand and take any necessary action.
“The dashboard helps us look at populations as a whole,” Robby explains. “It allows us to identify patterns and tie them back to the patient safety priorities and it assists employees to convert data into action. More timely access informs better decision making, which in turn supports better patient outcomes.”
His colleague Deb Ram-Ditta who nominated him says, “Being innovative means doing things differently and creating environments in which staff are given the tools and resources to achieve their goals. Robby has exemplified this by constantly creating opportunities for others to access performance data in a meaningful way that promotes engagement.”
Robby is the winner of this year’s Above and Beyond Innovator Award.