Numbers Worth a Party!

If you were to sit at our family dinner table in the evenings, you would quickly realize I find joy in celebrating achievements large or small. Whether it is success on a school assignment, learning to play an instrument or a new piece of music, or getting a promotion at work, I believe that all successes are worthy of recognition.

This is why it was so personally and professionally satisfying recently to share with my AvaSure colleagues a milestone in our Online Reporting of Nursing Analytics (ORNA®) program. For those who may not know it, ORNA® is a key differentiator in the services we offer our customers. It is the only comparative performance database in remote patient safety monitoring. Its data has been used in a number of clinical studies by customers to showcase results and by many more to improve their AvaSure program.

So I donned a party hat and blew a party whistle to commemorate the occasion – the 1 millionth patient discharged from ORNA®, an event that occurred on Feb. 24. To put this into context for my visual friends, if those patients were lying head-to-toe in their hospital beds, they would stretch from Belmont, Mich., AvaSure’s headquarters, to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque (and a customer!).

Those 1 million patients represent nearly 70 million monitoring hours in the ORNA® database. During those hours, more than 7 million adverse events were prevented. With the use of the TeleSitting technology, patients have been saved from the harm of a fall or eloping from their room. Medical devices stayed put instead of being yanked out by a confused patient and having to be reinserted by staff. Another thing to feel good about is knowing clinical staff were saved from much verbal and physical harm.

Of course, in the past two years, we documented thousands of COVID patients being watched around the clock by staff who did not have to don PPE and risk exposure to the coronavirus on many occasions, or knew the instant a patient needed an intervention.

ORNA® provides a data community for our customers. AvaSure program managers have the ability to review their metrics and celebrate milestones whether it be percent of room units in use, reaching a safe Stat alarm response time average at the hospital or care unit level or comparing their hospital to peers to see where they are ahead of the curve and what needs improving.

ORNA® allows program managers to export graphs and share them hospital-wide with key stakeholders within the program. These results are often part of executive-level dashboards as key performance indicators. This is how we improve safety and quality over time.

For more information about ORNA® and how you may be able to better utilize data within your TeleSitting program, please reach out to ORNA@avasure.com. And we encourage you to celebrate success every chance you get.

Jill Kaminski is AvaSure’s Clinical Data and Systems Analyst