Reducing medication errors in healthcare through accountability and process standardization

Medical reconciliation and process errors continue to be an integral aspect of waste within the healthcare industry. Technology, which is either antiquated or not properly integrated, has become cumbersome. This has created errors in processing that lowers customer service and delays treatment. The steps the often lead to error are simply and straightforward

Bring patient in or visit patient

Check paper work and blood group (ERRORS OCCUR WITH INPUTS AND PROCESSING HERE)

Meds OK?

(Errors with lack of actual information checking)

Check Meds

(Errors occur with meds, amounts, and administering treatment)

Provide treatment

Update Treatment Status

(Errors occur entering information properly)

Identification of possible prevention and recovery steps for the undesirable event

JCAHO will be surveying the agency in August of 2016. Quality must be improved prior to this survey. Prevention and recovery steps are both simple and straightforward. The general premise that underlines preventions is accountability. The organization must hold all stakeholders within the organization accountable for their overall performance. To do this, leadership must outline minimum, acceptable standards for all employees. These standards will set a quality floor as it relates to both service and treatment. Second, leadership must monitor the overall adherence to these standards. This will involve supervisory visits to clinicians who made at least one error over the past two weeks. Under these guidelines the supervisor will reschedule a visit to ensure that quality standards are being met. Finally, the strategy must be proactive in identifying errors prior to their occurrence. To do this, the plan includes hiring an agency to perform a MOCK survey prior to the actual JCAHO survey in August. This is to again insure that standards are being implemented and service is being properly administered.

3. Accurately identify the barriers to using this tool in health care

A barrier to using SWOT analysis if overemphasizing the provided results. Too often, organization rely solely on the SWOT analysis without doing further research. SWOT analysis will created information that is useful to the organization. However other planning methods and tools will also be useful in helping the organization achieve its stated objectives (Blake, 2015). Focus groups, surveys and test-marketing are just some of the other techniques that can supplement organizational research. Relying solely on the SWOT analysis could potentially be detrimental to the organization. Another barrier is the overall size of the organization. In large healthcare organization, there are many moving parts and elements. Strength in one department for example, may be a weakness in another. An overall organization SWOT analysis may be too broad to actually implement in practice. As a result of the sheer size of the organization, SWOT strategy may result in fighting among the different members of the organization (Ommani, 2011).

4. Research the supports the information provided

1. Blake, Martin; Wijetilaka, Shehan (2015). "5 tips to grow your start-up using SWOT analysis"

2. Ommani, Ahmad ( 2011). "SWOT analysis for business management" African Journal of Business Management: 9448-9454