CHRISTUS Health Increases Safety Event Reporting with VigiLanz

Customer Profile

CHRISTUS Health is an international Catholic, not-for-profit health system comprising more than 600 centers, including community hospitals, urgent care centers, health insurance companies, and physician clinics in Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Latin America. With more than 45,000 team members and more than 15,000 physicians providing individualized care, CHRISTUS aims to deliver a complete healing experience that respects every individual.

Challenge

Adverse drug events (ADEs) represent a significant, and often avoidable, problem in United States healthcare. ADEs cause approximately 1.3 million emergency department visits annually, and about 350,000 of those patients need to be hospitalized for further treatment – yet it’s estimated that half of ADEs in the U.S. are preventable.

Often, when these events do occur, they are either unreported or lack critical details and context. This makes it difficult for quality, safety, risk management, and other teams to document, analyze, and prevent similar events from occurring in the future.

While many hospitals have patient safety event reporting processes and procedures in place, many lack automated event detection capabilities to make the event reporting faster, easier, and more accurate.

Solution

With its dedication to improving patient safety, CHRISTUS implemented VigiLanz’s safety surveillance solution, which automates the management, reporting, and detection of safety events, in 2021. This patient safety software integrates clinical data from multiple sources with comprehensive detection and investigation tools. For example, VigiLanz monitors EHR data—including data related to patient demographics, medication orders, medication administrations, lab results, radiology notes, and vital signs—and documents triggered events based on CHRISTUS-defined safety event criteria. This makes it easier for CHRISTUS to quickly identify, manage, address, and prevent adverse drug events.

Key Benefits Include:

• Improved efficiency, accuracy, and completeness of events reported
• Safety events recorded in near real-time
• Ability for patient safety teams and claims managers to intervene quickly
• More comprehensive capture of safety events

CHRISTUS team members can also use the VigiLanz solution to quickly document and self-report safety events through customizable forms, mobile access, mandatory fields, and anonymous reporting. The solution includes:

• Patient safety event reporting analytics and investigative tools that can be used within specific departments, sites, and across the enterprise.
• Customizable and automated email notifications and automated escalations to ensure timely reviews and management.

Outcomes

Over an 18-month period, CHRISTUS deployed 21 surveillance rules to auto-detect ADEs. This led to a 400% increase in ADRs reported compared to manual reporting.

“Automated event detection saves us a significant amount of time, and gives us more peace of mind that more events are captured,” said Tina Collins, PharmD, Corporate Director of Medication Safety at the Division of Clinical Excellence and CHRISTUS Health. “As a result, we can now spend more time analyzing events and identifying improvement opportunities.”

CHRISTUS facilities with VigiLanz identified 8.7 times more ADRs than facilities that relied on voluntary reporting. In addition, more than 77% of the auto-detected ADEs led to an investigation – a testament to the accuracy of the software’s rules.

Overall, CHRISTUS saw a 66% overall increase in ADRs reported for harm categories (including mild harm, moderate harm, severe harm, and death) with auto-detection compared to manual reporting. Auto-detection also identified 4.8 times more near-miss ADRs, 1.6 times more mild-harm ADRs, and 2.3 times more moderate-harm ADRs compared to manual reporting.

“Our number of reported events is increasing due to automated event detection and reporting,” said Collins. “The technology, which is now used across all of our hospitals, ensures we’re capturing more events and gathering more insights.”

Learn more about how VigiLanz helps hospitals improve patient safety event reporting.