Preventing adverse events by mining “triggers” in patient data

How can hospitals improve patient safety when their own symptoms of malady are not reported?

According to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), hospitals need more effective ways to identify events causing harm to patients, to quantify the degree and severity of harm, and to select and test changes to reduce harm. While there has been slow progress toward proactive prevention of adverse events, an innovative solution based on the IHI’s Global Trigger Tool offers great promise. This new Patient Safety Service identifies what has gone wrong and supports patient safety teams in improving clinical care processes. With the application of advanced analytics, it may even catch adverse events before they lead to patient harm.

The challenge of providing better quality at lower cost will be the focus of all health economies for the next 20 years—and data analytics will play a powerful role. More and more, health analytics are aimed at predicting what might happen, and even prescribing what will happen, and less on what happened, retrospectively. This presents real opportunity to drive benefits to all who pay for, deliver and receive healthcare.

CGI’s Patient Safety Service provides the foundation for future proactive prevention of adverse events. Advanced analytics capabilities can be applied to patient safety program data, offering great promise for identifying and catching adverse events before they lead to patient harm. To learn more about this solution please visit www.cgi.com/en/solutions/patient-safety-service, or to schedule a discussion with a CGI health analytics expert, please contact us.