SAFE and Sound

SAFE and Sound

Meticulous Analysis Helps Improve Obstetric Quality and Outcomes While attending her parents’ anniversary party at an upscale restaurant, a young woman in her 35th week of pregnancy began suffering intense abdominal pain, and an ambulance was summoned. Fortunately, the woman was taken to a hospital that had an Obstetric Emergency Department (OBED), and the OB/GYN hospitalist on duty quickly evaluated her condition and took swift action.

Writhing in pain, the patient began sweating profusely, and her abdomen was exceptionally tender. A monitor failed to pick up fetal heart tones, but an ultrasound detected a dangerously slow fetal heartbeat. While staff attempted to contact the woman’s personal obstetrician in another city, an emergency C-section was performed and a uterine rupture discovered. The mother was given two units of blood, and the baby was transferred to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Both recovered fully.

The best medical care is immediate care. The scenario above depicts just one of any number of emergent situations where time and medical expertise make the difference between a joyful event and calamity. The presence of an experienced, Board Certified obstetrician 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, allows expectant mothers to receive the very best — and safest — care at a moment’s notice. And while the OBED is fundamental to the overall infrastructure of Ob Hospitalist Group (OBHG), we continually focus on an even broader mission — to elevate the standard of women’s healthcare. Our strong commitment to safety and quality makes happy beginnings possible.

An essential component of that charge is our SAFE Program, a comprehensive, outcomes-driven rubric that provides an enterprise approach to risk reduction, quality improvement, and regulatory compliance in order to maximize the quality of OB/GYN care.

Communication and collaboration are essential in maintaining OBHG’s excellent patient safety record. In every partner hospital, the entire care team must collaborate consistently and commit to an organization-wide culture of safety. This team-led approach across OBHG allows us to continue growing our services and offering excellent care through more than 1 million patient encounters to date.

Why We Are Better SAFE Just as the medical community rightly embraces evidence-based practice, OBHG recognizes the importance of capturing comprehensive data to inform and continuously improve its clinical operations. A cornerstone of our Risk Management, Quality, and Compliance Department is the secure, dictation-based SAFE Hotline, through which OBHG partner hospitals and provider teams report risk events, potential system issues, trends, near-miss incidents, and life saves.

Ob Hospitalist Group

10 Centimeters Drive • Mauldin, SC 29662 • P: 864.908.3530 • F: 864.627.9920 • www.OBHG.com

Risk data obtained from the SAFE Hotline are reviewed within OBHG’s Patient Safety Evaluation System (PSES).

Then multi-departmental teams conduct clinical reviews, provide constructive feedback, and develop proactive, non-punitive action plans aimed at improving obstetrical outcomes nationally. From a national perspective, the SAFE Hotline has allowed OBHG to become the industry leader in data collection on the sub-specialty of obstetric hospitalists. This approach is particularly valuable to partner hospitals located in jurisdictions that have limited state-level peer review systems.

The SAFE Hotline data-collection system has enabled OBHG to proactively identify and mitigate obstetrical risk as well as provide comprehensive reports to our partner hospitals on trends and opportunities. These valuable performance metrics also are compiled and displayed in a format that allows partner hospitals to compare their own metrics on such things as National Quality Forum (NQF) OB/GYN measures with regional and national data.

Performance on these core measures directly impacts hospital reimbursement as well as patient outcomes and satisfaction.

Best Practice Standardization for the Best Outcomes Continuing education is paramount for maintaining and expanding the superlative skill set our OBHG providers bring to their programs. It’s what our partner hospitals expect, and OBHG accepts nothing less than clinical excellence.

OBHG requires that its clinicians complete comprehensive coursework before their first day on the job. From there, consistent continuing education remains an enduring tenet of OBHG practice.

In addition, OBHG uses a complex digital platform to ensure practice standardization among our clinical teams to facilitate improved clinical outcomes and reduced risk. To augment that, we implemented OBHG University, an online resource for our clinicians that provides educational updates and the latest best practice protocols, as well as webinars and white papers on compelling OB/GYN-related topics.

SAFE features a comprehensive compliance program to ensure adherence to multiple regulations that impact healthcare organization, including federal privacy and security rules. In addition, OBHG maintains superior insurance coverage for cyber and regulatory risk. Our annual compliance work plan includes a training program on healthcare regulatory updates and general compliance knowledge.

OBHG believes that there is, indeed, safety in numbers — in the risk and quality data that inform our training, our investments, and our overall operations. Our commitment to capturing all available information from every OBHG program helps us raise the performance bar every single day.

For more information, visit www.OBHG.com, contact Programs@OBHG.com, or call 800.967.2289.

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REV 7/16

Ob Hospitalist Group

10 Centimeters Drive • Mauldin, SC 29662 • P: 864.908.3530 • F: 864.627.9920 • www.OBHG.com