From Situational Awareness to Informed Awareness:
Elevating Your Hospital's Decision-Making
You probably understand the importance of situational awareness to modern hospitals and health systems, but what if you could take it a step further? Given today’s industry challenges, basic awareness isn't enough. To ensure the success of your organization, a paradigm shift is in order. Welcome to the realm of "Informed Awareness". While situational awareness offers a starting point for decision-making, unlocking the true potential of your organization demands a deeper, more comprehensive understanding.
Situational Awareness in Healthcare:
Most hospital and health system leaders are familiar with "situational awareness" - you and your staff are generally aware when there is an issue or potential issue. Most hospitals achieve at least some level of situational awareness via DIY solutions and EHR tools, and the experienced hospital executive often knows in his or her gut when something isn't quite right. However, even with this awareness, they realize something is still missing. Too often, hospitals and health systems find themselves reacting to problems that have already occurred. This creates chaos, wastes time and valuable resources, and prevents them from addressing issues in an ideal manner.
What is Informed Awareness?
Informed awareness is a higher level of awareness. It builds upon basic situational awareness to provide a holistic view of retrospective, real-time, and predictive intelligence across the organization. It delivers recommended, prioritized actions that drive the best decisions possible to prevent and resolve issues. Everyone from the executive level to the front lines knows who is responsible for taking action, and they are empowered to take those actions.
Informed awareness isn't just about knowing that a situation is brewing in the present moment. It's the culmination of all necessary insights required to fuel informed actions, strategic decision-making, and thorough planning. This comprehensive understanding fosters dramatic results and sustainable success. It's all about having complete and prioritized information to guide decision-making. This information must also be validated by accurate data and empowered by cutting-edge technology in order to get the most out of it. Informed awareness elevates your observation and decision-making abilities, eliminating inefficiency and uncertainty for your hospital or health system.
How is Informed Awareness Different from Situational Awareness?
While situational awareness is reactive, informed awareness starts with a proactive stance. Situational awareness is akin to seeing the tip of an iceberg; it provides a partial picture of the present situation but stops short of offering actionable solutions to prevent future problems and fails to help you correct pervasive, recurring challenges. In contrast, informed awareness provides visibility not just to the surface but also to the depth and breadth of your healthcare system's challenges. Looking beneath the surface is the only way to gain the informed awareness you need to achieve operational excellence.
Consider a hospital that has only situational awareness: There is a severe backup in the emergency department. Patients are on stretchers in the hallways waiting for an inpatient bed, and the problem builds until the hospital is on the verge of moving to diversion. Situational awareness might point toward a problem in the ED or with inpatient bed availability, but what’s happening in those areas is only a symptom of the true problem. Trying to fix the problem within the emergency department or just on the units will lead nowhere.
With informed awareness, the hospital is equipped with the right processes and tools to understand the full nature of the issue and what actions to take to fix or prevent it. You are alerted to dozens of inpatient discharges that are in danger of being delayed beyond their estimated discharge date because patients cannot get an MRI, have outstanding PT evals, or are cleared for discharge today pending a cardiology consult. Recommendations suggest which MRIs are non-urgent and can be converted to outpatient orders, expediting the discharges of affected patients and opening several inpatient beds. In addition, inpatient MRIs, consults, and PT evaluations that are required for discharge are prioritized and completed so they occur in time for on-schedule discharges, creating even more capacity in inpatient units. Patients move out of the emergency department to their inpatient beds. The ED never backs up in the first place. The crisis is averted.
What if the scenario in the ED occurs consistently? No one wants to expend time and valuable resources solving the same problem repeatedly. Another key element of informed awareness is the ability to see historical trends, identify root causes, and gain actionable recommendations to fix pervasive, recurring challenges. With informed awareness, you can identify that MRIs are a problem every Friday. The recommendation is to adjust schedules for outpatient MRIs and add an additional technologist for a few hours on Fridays. Upon execution, you remove a source of trouble that produces benefits across the organization.
Informed awareness bridges the gap between the realization of a problem and the solution, empowering you to navigate challenges with confidence and foresight.
Situational Awareness Isn’t Enough
Exclusively relying on situational awareness can dimmish strategic effectiveness, making it difficult to meet your strategic goals. While it's important for addressing the immediate plight, situational awareness falls short of the awareness level necessary to maximize your success.
An organization with only situational awareness risks missing many less obvious real-time issues and bottlenecks. Future problems that could be avoided are often only identified after the fact, bypassing the opportunity to avoid chaos and inefficiencies. Without informed awareness, the organization can also find itself repeatedly solving the same problems without ever identifying and fixing the root cause. This prevents them from moving on to solve new problems and challenges, diminishing their potential success.
Which Type of Awareness Does Your Organization Have?
Gauging your organization's awareness level might not be as straightforward as you'd hope. While the need for informed awareness is universal, achieving it is less common. Often, tools and technologies fall short of providing the requisite visibility, connectivity, and actionable insights necessary.
To what degree do you rely on your EHR for awareness? While Electronic Health Record (EHR) suites offer reams of data, deriving wisdom from them remains a challenge. If your organization is relying on an EHR alone to attempt to gain informed awareness, you’re likely missing out. EHR suites only provide situational awareness. EHR visibility tends to be too localized, and the reporting tools can be unwieldy and time-consuming to use. They don’t inform you about why issues might be occurring or how to fix them (and prevent them in the future), leaving you uninformed and with only limited awareness.
Signs that your organization has only achieved situational awareness:
-
#1
Your issues are addressed in a reactive instead of a proactive mode.
-
#2
You’re aware of current problems but lack a full understanding of the cause of the problem and have little information on what to do about it.
-
#3
Decisions are often made based on incomplete information.
-
#4
You have an overwhelming amount of data but no recommended actions or resolutions.
-
#5
There is confusion over who is accountable for addressing and resolving specific issues.
-
#6
There is a lack of clarity as to which indicators should be monitored and how to interpret them.
-
#7
You realize that the same problems are addressed repeatedly.
-
#8
Your visibility is too limited to give you the whole picture of your organization.
-
#9
Staff are unsure of what to do when presented with unfamiliar situations.
How to Achieve Informed Awareness
Elevating your organization's awareness demands a holistic approach that spans across all levels, areas, and perspectives of the organization. Technology that provides full-system intelligence, predictive analytics, and prescriptive insights is pivotal in this journey. Enter CareEdge™ – a digital health platform designed to cultivate informed awareness. By providing real-time, retrospective, and predictive intelligence, CareEdge™ gives you the tools needed to unlock your data’s potential.
It isn't just about raw data; it's about harnessing that data from a multitude of sources and creating the insights to use it to its fullest potential. CareEdge™ also prioritizes actions, drives accountability, and identifies persistent challenges. It transforms your data into actionable insights, bridging the gap between information and impactful decision-making.
Having the technology to provide intelligence and insights is the first step. Informed awareness also requires that an organization is prepared with the right roles and processes for success. Everyone in the system needs to understand who is accountable for monitoring the insights and key indicators that support the organization’s strategy. Those roles must also know how to interpret and react to indicators when they are off target and how to escalate them when necessary. Now, you’ll be ready to act quickly and proactively to resolve current issues and even prevent those that have not yet occurred.
The Long-Term Benefits of Informed Awareness:
Embracing informed awareness isn't just an effective choice for day-to-day operations; it's a strategic imperative for the sustainable growth of your hospital or health system. It lays the foundation for a harmonious and efficient organization that thrives even amidst complexities and industry evolutions.
If your organization is currently stuck in the realm of situational awareness and held back by its limitations, the powerful combination of the CareEdge™ digital platform technology with a properly prepared organization could provide the key to breaking free and achieving the long-term benefits of informed awareness. CareEdge™ is more than just another analytical tool; it's a transformative toolkit designed to propel your health system toward informed awareness and empower you to navigate the future with confidence.