Measure & Manage All Harm All the Time for All Patients

We’re pleased to release the latest update to the white paper describing the incredible patient harm reduction health systems are achieving by using our “Virtual Patient Safety “(VPS) solution.  To refresh, Pascal offers a revolutionary new approach of Virtual Patient Safety which generates clinically validated adverse event outcomes (AE Outcomes) – at scale – using real-time EHR and health IT data. 

VPS provides up to 24/7 remote adverse event monitoring, measurement, and management of AE Outcomes in order to identify and support the reduction of safety vulnerabilities, clinical risk, and quality variation.

Why Should the Field and the Industry Care?

Let us count (some of) the reasons:

  • The problem is profound:  Pascal Metrics has shown that the negative clinical and financial impact is far deeper and wider than “simply” the awful impact of preventable injury and death on patients and their families.
  • The opportunity is here:  some of the largest U.S. health systems are contracted to use VPS; CMS has embraced EHR-based harm measurement; and leading states will soon.
  • The solution works:  there is a scalable way to use clinically validated adverse event outcomes using EHR and health IT data (AE Outcomes) to measure and manage preventable harm.
  • The results are validated:  Pascal clients find 10x the serious harm within 24 hours as compared to traditional methods (that take days/weeks/months to find), and clients are reducing >25% of all-cause harm and >60% of specific harm.
  • The ROI is validated:  Pascal clients generate at least 3x ROI annually and over 5x in steady state, depending on the configuration of the health system – using validated clinical and financial outcome data.
  • The standard of care for patient safety is changing:  as health systems validate that this method works and supports better care (as is happening), other stakeholders – such as medical professional liability insurers, employers, health plans, and life sciences (as the FDA embraces CMS’ EHR-based harm measurement) will require this standard as well.

Leading Hospitals & Health Systems Are Rapidly Embracing Pascal’s Virtual Patient Safety Method

Leading hospitals and health systems are identifying 10x the level of serious harm as compared to traditional methods (e.g. voluntary event reporting) and reducing over 25% of that all-cause harm, and over 60% of specific harm by implementing Pascal’s VPS solution.  VPS includes a combination of Pascal software (Risk Trigger® Monitor) and expert services (Expert Clinical Review, Expert Safety Advisory) subscriptions.

AE Outcomes are used by clinical teams at leading hospitals and health systems to support concurrent intervention, cycles of improvement measured in minutes, hours, and days (versus weeks, months, and years), and are essential for validating patient safety-related return on investment (ROI).

Summary of White Paper Revisions

Key enhancements to version 4.0 of the white paper include but are not limited to:

  1. The Problem – Providing greater detail beyond the obvious problem of preventable patient injury and death being undesirable to broader and deeper problems through the care delivery enterprise:  functionally, operationally, and strategically
  2. Expert Clinical Review (ECR) – Pascal released the up to 24/7 ECR subscription amidst COVID-19 in 2020 to make “gold standard” clinical review cost-effective and deliver definitional consistency for all Pascal clients. ECR uses Pascal’s proprietary software and remote centralized clinical review to apply evidence-based epidemiology on every single patient looking for all harm and doing this all of the time — turning the idea of a “control tower” approach to safety from aspirational activity to operational value.  
  3. ROI – Pascal added both recent real world evidence data that is expected to be published, as well as more recent government data that bolsters a “CFO-grade” patient safety business case that’s only available with AE Outcomes.

Reading Tip

Senior clinicians and executives will benefit by reviewing the ‘Executive Summary’ and any relevant sections of interest. 

Managers and those deeper in operations will benefit from a deeper dive to begin to understand the richness of this solution required to address a hard problem in complex organizations. 

All will see that there is no “magic bullet”, and implementing VPS is far more than acquiring the latest patient safety “tool”, deploying some software, or learning from consultants – it’s a new transformational method of operationalizing patient safety, risk, and quality. 

For a copy of the white paper version 4.0 download here.