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This marks our third consecutive year that we have honored organizations for achievement in making remote video patient monitoring a vital tool in patient and staff safety, nursing efficiency and cost control.

The honors include the Safety Net Award for the most complete AvaSys program; the Path to Zero Award for the most impressive fall reduction program centered around video monitoring; the Hub and Spoke Award, for the most efficient use of AvaSys by multi-site organizations using a single remote central observation center; and the Video Monitor Staff Superstar Award, which recognizes an individual who consistently goes above and beyond to ensure the safety of patients and staff.

Our final Symposium day started off with wisdom and a beautifully passionate talk by Lee Woodruff. She instilled inspiration in everyone and showed us how far love and hope can go.

Following Lee’s talk, we hung out with local artist Erick Picardo, who throughout the day had a community painting piece where symposium attendees helped to paint sections of the piece which represented our growing community and coming together.

The last round of breakout sessions were fascinating and included topics on behavioral health, video monitoring in acute care and rehab, and how to effectively use video monitoring and create a stable base for successful implementation.

Susan Dentzer, a leading national expert in healthcare and healthcare policy, closed off the symposium with endless knowledge and insights into staffing retention and how to keep up with the many changes throughout the healthcare field.

We are sad to say goodbye to such an amazing group of people who came together to gain knowledge into video monitoring and learn how they can effectively help to enhance patient and staff safety in their organizations. We are excited to be a part of your organization and can’t wait to see you again next year.

If  you want to connect with a member of our team to learn more about our product, how to enhance your utilization, or have a question, send us a message at info@avasure.com.

It is possible to increase patient safety and decrease in-person observer costs when using all available cameras, all the time. The AvaSure clinical team recommends the following tips for achieving 100% utilization:

Socialization
Reaching maximum utilization may begin well in advance of the AvaSys go-live date. Building internal awareness among staff and multidisciplinary teams is critical to fostering acceptance of AvaSys. AvaSure can provide “coming soon” posters, an AvaSys awareness video and eLearning modules for your staff. AvaSure’s eLearning modules provide an excellent introduction to the software and the program. Other avenues of building internal awareness include newsletters and introductions in department and staff meetings. Choose clinical champions from each nursing unit who will participate in the development of policy and workflow and assist with education of staff.

Dedicated monitor staff
The staff at the monitor station are an integral part of the patient care team. When choosing team members for the monitor tech position, select individuals who are highly focused on patient safety in their daily work, have a patient care background and are comfortable speaking and engaging with patients. Ensure that each monitor tech has sufficient time in the role to maintain skills and an elevated level of comfort navigating the software and communicating with patients. This will lead to increased level of trust from nursing staff.

Leadership support
During the program planning and development phase, AvaSure’s team of clinical nurses will guide and support you with best practice resources. In addition to the time spent with the AvaSure team, an internal work-group of nursing leaders is encouraged to meet regularly for policy and workflow development. When leadership is engaged in this process, the success of the AvaSys program is made a priority and goals are clearly communicated. After the go live of the AvaSys program, a highly involved team is needed to support the monitor techs in their new role and encourage utilization of cameras by the nursing staff. Consider using nursing supervisors as AvaSys “gatekeepers” to ensure that policy and workflows are followed closely on every shift. The use of sharepoint knowledge base could also help provide a centralized, searchable and secure knowledge management system that would allow staff to become more self-sufficient.

Communication
The staff at the monitor station are considered an integral part of the patient care team. Encourage frequent communication between the nursing staff and monitor techs. RNs who are assigned to patients on AvaSys should call and introduce themselves to the monitor techs at the beginning of each shift and provide an update on each patient. The more information that the RNs provide to the monitor tech, the more the monitor tech can do to help them keep patients safe. The monitor techs are a reliable source of information on patient behavior as they are the only members of the care team with constant visualization of patients.

Culture
Including AvaSys in the culture of safety at your facility is the key to 100% utilization. This can be done by following the above tips and best practice recommendations from AvaSure’s Clinical Program Specialists. AvaSure has a wealth of resources developed after working with successful AvaSys programs around the country. Having a clearly defined policy with inclusion criteria is critical to nurses embracing AvaSys as a nursing intervention. AvaSys should be considered another tool in the patient safety toolbox!

Bonus tip
Special populations. Many of AvaSure’s customers are expanding their programs and achieving success utilizing AvaSys to keep behavioral health patients and those with specific medical conditions safe. If you are interested in expanding your program to include monitoring of patients with suicidal ideation, please reach out to your Clinical Program Specialist for assistance and resources.

Spurred by more recent value-based payment programs, healthcare organizations are collecting data through clinical data analytics to measure, trend, and benchmark adverse events at the unit, hospital and system level, and comparing them – or being compared publicly (like it or not!) – with national benchmarks.

It’s not perfect, but we are doing MUCH better at recording and categorizing harms done to patients, even as our track record of preventing them is mixed.

The “Safety Net” for reducing patient harm and falls 
The measure that is not captured is the patient who almost experienced an adverse event, but that event was prevented because of diligent surveillance, immediate action and rapid staff response. This measure, the prevented adverse event – often referred to as a “near miss” – is the true safety net in organizations.

Only AvaSure’s monitoring and program evaluation has added a level of precision to measure this true patient safety net in organizations. The latest generation AvaSure monitoring software allows these near misses to be captured in real time by the monitor tech. ORNA^® – AvaSure’s Online Reporting of Nursing Analytics, is the database that enables you to report, analyze and improve your performance.

How it works
When a monitor staff observes a patient starting to inch closer to the edge of the bed or views a patient reaching for an item too far away, the monitor staff initiates a call to the nurse, while engaging the patient to let he/she know that a nurse is on the way to assist them. They encourage the patient to stay in bed so as to remain safe.

The monitoring staff enters data into that specific patient’s adverse event reporting system, and documents the fall as an averted situation and notes the interaction.

As a result, the AvaSure data collected enables you to measure:

• The number of patients enrolled in surveillance who almost fell.
• The number of patients enrolled in surveillance for fall prevention. Those who tried to get up without help and the fall was prevented.

Reporting and data metrics you care about
Beyond an overall fall rate, you can collect the following data, trended monthly/quarterly, and annually:

1. Overall fall incidence for all patients being watched by AvaSure monitor staff.
2. Overall fall incidence for those enrolled for fall prevention, as well as the rate for those who did not fall.
3. Number of patients who had a fall prevented because of monitor staff‘s intervention. This is the true safety net – vigilance, action and response!
4. Monitor staff performance: The number of interventions/interactions with patients that resulted in a prevented adverse event.
5. Timeliness of emergency response: The number of seconds for staff to arrive at the patient’s bedside following the monitor tech’s activation of the Stat alarm.

All data elements paint the picture of your organization’s safety net. Importantly, data elements 3, 4 and 5 provide you with valid and reliable data that only AvaSure’s ORNA database can deliver. This is a true measure of vigilance and rapidity of response to urgent or emergent patient safety situations.

To capture the true safety net of early detection and timely workforce response with comparative ease and accuracy is very exciting! For each the “early detection of an at-risk situation,” AvaSure’s ORNA database enables data collection of the risk factor that was mitigated/eliminated because of each detection and near immediate staff response (an average response of 13 seconds).

For those using the new software and ORNA, please share with us your experience with measuring prevented adverse events. For those who are not, I have a simple question: What are you waiting for?

Pat Quigley, PhD, ARNP, CRRN, principal of Nurse Consultant, LLC, AvaSure Board Member

As hospitals evaluate ways to improve patient falls, patient outcomes, advance patient safety and address staffing shortages while minimizing costs, they face a pressing concern: How can they provide 24/7 monitoring for high-risk patients without incurring unsustainable labor costs?

Twenty-three healthcare leaders gathered April 13 for a roundtable discussion sponsored by AvaSure at Becker’s Hospital Review’s 9th Annual Meeting, where Terry Olinger, president of the Hospitals and Clinics Acute Care Group at Great Falls, Mont.-based Benefis Health System, shared how the system used the AvaSys^® TeleSitter video-observation system to improve patient safety and lower staffing costs.

“The thing I was really skeptical about was, will this make a difference? … but the [system] really does work … it’s amazing when you see it in action,” Mr. Olinger said. Benefis has been using AvaSys for about two years, with funding support from its foundation.

The AvaSys room unit is offered in three options: a mobile cart, a portable wall-mounted unit or a permanent ceiling unit.  It lets a single monitor technician keep tabs via video on up to 12 patient rooms from a command center – at Benefis it is in the patient flow center. The monitor tech can use the two-way audio to immediately intervene via two-way audio when a patient is at risk of self-harm, such as a fall. The monitor tech can talk to the patient to verbally redirect them. If the situation is emergent, the tech can activate an alarm and a nurse will know to get there right away. Overall, AvaSys helps improve staffing efficiencies by allowing nursing assistants to stay on the floor instead of watching patients 1:1.

Mr. Olinger outlined how the hospital reduced both staffing costs and patient falls.

When the Joint Commission issues a Sentinel Event Alert, it is taken seriously by accredited organizations, a warning that they need to immediately focus on and devote resources to the problem in question. The alert states that healthcare workers are now four times more likely to be victimized than workers in private industry. This workplace violence results in low staff morale, lawsuits, and higher worker turnover. It is essential that these industries look into ways of reducing this violence, perhaps through the use of automated risk management tools to save time and have planned out solutions, or with regular check-ins with staff.

Whatever the method, violence must stop. All staff needs to feel safe and secure in their work environment, in whatever capacity that is. Not speaking up about violence is understandable, they can be worried in case they are not believed or they just feel like it’s their job and they should ‘put up with it’, but that is not the case. Employees would feel more open to speaking up if they felt like they could talk openly with their managers, team leaders, etc. these figureheads need to have a relationship to colleagues and tell them that their voice matters and that they should always speak up.

Look beyond only hiring security
Organizations must begin to look beyond solutions that only increase security and be ready to act when encountering verbal or physical abuse. The AvaSys TeleSitter Solution is a technology that is already positioned to identify and direct interventions in attacks on staff. Now, with recent advancements in software, AvaSys^® assists in the tracking, reporting, and analyzing of workplace violence to reduce the incidence of these events.

Join Commissions action items for reducing workplace violence
The Joint Commission has provided a list of action items to guide organizations towards transforming their environments into safe and secure places of employment. The AvaSys technology provides a platform that significantly contributes towards the implementation of these action items, as described below.

Reporting workplace violence is the first step in creating preventative measures.
The Joint Commission reports that only 30% of nurses report workplace attacks. AvaSys features an adverse event reporting system with customizable alerts so leadership can be immediately notified when the AvaSys monitor tech observes an event, even if the caregiver does not report it. Specifics of who, when, why, and how can be captured through observation and swift documentation. This is then sent directly to leadership so the incident can be immediately addressed, and appropriate resources deployed.

Only through analysis of data from multiple sources can we identify hazards, trends, and new strategies for making the healthcare workplace safe.
AvaSys allows for on-demand analysis of not only adverse events but also near misses through AvaSure’s ORNA^® Program (Online Reporting of Nursing Analytics). Inputs through the AvaSys software will become meaningful predictive metrics that contribute to the development of better risk assessment tools. By training monitor staff on specifics of reportable elements and details needed, ORNA will become a valuable database to aid in determining risk factors, trends, and areas for improvement.

Update work procedures to keep team members secure. By having the means to call for help we can protect staff, eliminate hazards, and implement safer work practices.
AvaSys has a proven track record of already preventing hundreds of potential assaults through the summoning of help by AvaSys monitor techs when they observe threatening situations. The AvaSys Stat Alert alarm, when activated, summons available assistance into the room within seconds. By implementing AvaSys monitoring, staff will feel more protected knowing there is a second set of eyes that will summon help quickly in the event violence occurs. Trends gleaned through analysis will allow caregivers to identify and initiate AvaSys monitoring on patients who are assessed to be at risk for potential violence.

Organizations with a live AvaSys program can begin these interventions immediately. If the software currently in use does not have adverse event or near miss reporting available, then you are eligible for an upgrade.

Contact AvaSure for more information and request your demo to learn how you can prevent further workplace violence against nurses.

Stacey Overholt RN, BSN, MBA, Vice President of Clinical Services, AvaSure