Mortality Review

 

There are many benefits to establishing a mortality and readmission review process in hospitals:

  • Avoiding preventable deaths
  • Improving patient safety and reliability
  • Improving end of life care
  • Managing an ageing population
  • Reducing harm and costs associated with complications
  • Improving hospital efficiency and reducing financial waste
  • Supporting internal peer review and credentialing processes
  • Maintaining reputation and reducing risk of liability for hospitals

Mortality and case review is a natural starting point for organisations along their healthcare improvement journey. Through the review of mortality as the most extreme outcome of harm to a patient there exists a continuum of harm and error that moves from death, morbidity and poor outcomes through to extended length of stay and financial waste and inefficiency.

The Metrixcare platform layer allows tracking and monitoring these cases using clinical indicators and performance measures such as Preventable Mortality and Adverse Drug Events. The indicators can be compared against existing benchmarks to determine if the hospital is safe and issues are under control.

Metrixcare assessment tools provide a mortality case review module that can be used to collect, monitor and analyse detailed information on individual patient cases. Information gained from these assessment of cases can be linked with other modules such as the one for clinical pharmacists to record information about the types of prescribing error, high-risk medications and possible individual and system failures. The information and insight produced by these modules allows a hospital to see the clusters of issues and some potential solutions to avoid future harm to patients.

Features

  • Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR)
  • Risk Standardised Readmission Index
  • Mortality Case Review
  • Preventable death reporting
  • Unplanned readmission reporting

The system measures the impact of interventions such as this in a continuous feedback loop by cascading information back up through the layers to see the outcomes of analysis and prevention efforts. Over time these measures change from identifying a problem to becoming a tool for continuous accreditation of hospitals for patient safety.