3 Ways xMatters Can Ease Healthcare Incident Management
Many organizations use xMatters to keep their services running and reliable. From technology businesses to complex enterprises, one particular industry that has overwhelmingly benefited from the use of xMatters is healthcare.
In healthcare incident management, speed and effectiveness are vital. Incidents are critical, and quality patient care is the highest priority. For those reasons and many more, integrating xMatters into healthcare processes can revolutionize the way incidents are handled, analyzed, and learned to provide a better overall patient experience.
Spot the Issue’s Origin
Where did the issue start? When did it start? What were the signs that it started? In medicine, these questions can help you get to the root of an issue and help build a diagnosis. And in incident management, they’re a big help too. By knowing the origin of an issue, teams can put together plans and procedures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
For example, imagine that a substantial supply of annual vaccines recently arrived at your facility and that to be correctly stored, they need to be kept refrigerated. A team member immediately stores them in the refrigerator and goes to take their lunch break, not realizing the door didn’t fully seal before they left. By the time someone notices the fridge is open, the temperature is far beyond what’s considered safe, and every vaccine needs to be discarded.
Now, imagine that this facility had its monitoring tools integrated with xMatters. xMatters would have quickly noted that the temperature of the fridge was rising, and alerted the first on-call responder about the issue. They would have checked the door, noticed it was ajar, and fixed the issue without any waste. When the weekly or monthly incident report was created, xMatters would have provided detailed records of this and any other incident, noting exactly when and where it began, who resolved it, and how quickly they did so.
Speed of Relevant Alerts
Speed is of the essence when it comes to medical incidents, and organizations can’t be tied down to manual processes that eat away at valuable time. Consider how your team connects patients to doctors or nurses, or the ways you’re alerted of an issue. How many people, or outdated types of technology, are relied on to get messages from one place to another?
With xMatters, on-call alerts can be seamlessly managed through automated workflows. The start of an incident can spark a chain of relevant alerts to on-call responders, who can accept the message and note their availability to respond to it, or escalate it to the next in line. This also ensures that the alerts respondents receive are relevant to their responsibilities and priorities, not every alert from every incident that occurs.
Take for example Intermountain Healthcare, an xMatters customer whose previous on-call notification system for their Stroke program wasn’t meeting their needs. A reliance on pagers was dragging down response times, was unreliable if a doctor was at a distance, and provided no context for what the emergency was, and where their patient was located. With xMatters integrated into their systems, they saw a 40% reduction in time spent notifying neurologists.
Contacting the Right Person First
Getting in contact with the right person right away can be a matter of life or death, and patients can’t wait for outdated systems and directories to try and find the right person for the job.
With xMatters, teams can build automated workflows to ensure incidents run smoothly, including the right point of contact first. On-call schedules and rotations can be easily added into xMatters, so that the moment an incident occurs, the system knows exactly who to send an alert to. Device preferences and teams are also simple variables to add and modify, so there’s a decreased risk of a message going to the wrong device that’s left unattended. Finally, timelines can also be modified in the system, meaning that if the first responder doesn’t acknowledge or escalate the issue on their own, the system will do it automatically.
To learn more about how xMatters can be integrated into your healthcare incident management processes, request a demo today!