Patient safety is crucial to delivering on the value proposition of ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). Patients need to know they’re in good hands—that the healthcare professionals at an ASC will care for them efficiently and safely, so they can get on the road to recovery and back to their normal lives as soon as possible. Other healthcare providers and partners also need this trust to be established, so they know they’re referring patients to highly qualified surgeons and practitioners who will provide effective care.
But patient safety can be difficult to navigate in a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape complicated by new regulatory and compliance requirements. That’s where technology steps in. The right technology can support patient safety by preventing errors, helping meet compliance standards, and streamlining safety protocols.
With that in mind, let’s explore the biggest patient safety pain points facing ASCs today, how technology can help address them, and a few practical strategies ASC leaders and administrators can use to help ensure compliance with safety standards.
There are five patient safety challenges in the ASC environment that are particularly notable: medication errors, infection prevention and sterilization documentation, wrong-site/wrong-procedure risks, and poor care team communication. Let’s break down each area to understand the specific challenges and how they affect patient safety.
Medication errors, while avoidable, are one of the most frequent sources of patient harm. Such errors can happen at any stage of the patient experience, from diagnosis to administration. Common causes of medication errors include using an expired product, incorrectly preparing a medication, administering the wrong dose, dispensing a drug to which a patient may be allergic, or missing a vital contraindication.
Medication errors can also occur on the patient's side due to miscommunication. For example, patients may not follow the correct procedure when taking the medication due to confusing instructions that were not properly explained. Some errors can even happen due to something as simple as sloppy handwriting.
While it’s impossible to eliminate all medication errors, ASCs can enhance patient safety by taking strategic steps to minimize them at every point of the care journey.
Many outbreaks and other adverse events in outpatient settings can be traced to breakdowns in basic infection prevention procedures.
Given this, ASC leaders and administrators must prioritize infection prevention and ensure that staff have adequate resources and training to meet patient safety standards. For example, ASCs may want to focus on developing robust and clear infection prevention and sterilization procedures and workflows. Combined with regular training, this can help staff protect patients.
And ASCs that can produce clear documentation demonstrating adherence to infection prevention and sterilization protocols can boost compliance amid increased scrutiny of patient safety in outpatient settings.
Wrong site, wrong side, wrong patient, wrong procedure, or wrong implant events—while rare—can cause major harm to patients and disrupt their lives. They can also jeopardize your ASC's reputation and staff morale and negatively affect the bottom line.
Preventing these risks is critical and requires a multifaceted approach to patient safety. For example, ASCs must target several areas, including scheduling (ensuring documentation is accurate), pre-op (site markings are correct), operating room procedures (time-out is performed properly), and more. A comprehensive strategy is needed to address wrong-site/wrong-procedure risks, implement safety protocol standards, and ensure staff adherence and compliance at scale.
In an outpatient setting, communication is everything. Patients are referred to your facility, and you must have systems and procedures in place to receive their data accurately. This starts the “baton pass” of care on the right foot, but communication does not end there. From administrators to surgeons and even coders and billers, communication is key to ensuring accurate documentation and treatment. Lapses in communication can lead to any of the above challenges (e.g., medication errors or wrong-site events) and other patient safety risks.
Team communication can be difficult to assess and address, but it starts at the top. Leadership must actively engage in communication and make ASC patient safety initiatives part of the organizational culture. Policy changes, patient safety standards, and compliance procedures must be communicated and embraced at every level. While not an easy task, technology can help improve communication and capture details that might otherwise not be communicated effectively.
Now that we understand some of the major pain points of ASC patient safety, let’s take a look at four technologies that can help solve them:
As defined by CMS, an electronic health record is a digital version of a patient’s medical history. It holds all relevant clinical data, including a patient’s medications, immunizations, lab and radiology reports, and more. EHR software can also support other care-related activities, such as evidence-based decision support, quality management, and outcomes reporting.
That said, EHR software can vary, which makes interoperability challenging, especially when sharing data between healthcare networks or other providers. ASC leaders and administrators should factor this into their decision-making and seek out ASC-specific EHRs. For example, some EHR systems are built with ASCs in mind, offering structured templates and clinical content, ASC-specific procedure and reporting workflows, ASC-specific coding documentation, and ASC clinical and operational analytics. Ensure your EHR has a robust API ecosystem that enables it to receive, capture, and organize data seamlessly with other healthcare systems.
EHRs can help improve patient safety by providing access to patient data in one place. They can also help standardize documentation with integrated checklists. When staff can easily find relevant clinical data for a patient, it can help reduce medication errors, treatment delays, and even wrong-site/wrong-patient events. Working with transparent, accurate, and clear data is key to enhancing patient safety, and EHRs can help facilitate this.
Compliance software can help ASCs standardize, track, and report on processes ranging from credentialing to sterilization. One of the key goals of compliance software is to help organizations meet accreditation and regulatory standards, which are largely in place to ensure patient safety. Thus, investing in compliance software, especially ASC-specific software, can achieve two goals: streamline compliance and enhance patient safety.
For example, consider SIS Comply. SIS Comply is designed for ASCs, with workflows tailored specifically to help meet the unique needs of ambulatory surgery centers. With SIS Comply, ASC administrators can easily roll out policy updates and reporting deadlines aligned with national patient safety standards, ASC regulations, and accreditation requirements. This can help keep staff aligned and on the same page, fostering a culture of safety in healthcare—one where every team member prioritizes compliance to protect patients.
In addition, SIS Comply provides a robust learning management system, a seamless credential tracker, digital logbooks, actionable reporting dashboards, and a centralized platform for policy and documentation management. All of these features can help ASCs standardize care protocols, simplify documentation, and ensure compliance at scale.
When it comes to infection control and prevention, knowing the specifics of the situation is critical to mitigating spread and protecting patients. This is where monitoring systems play a significant role. Monitoring systems track, record, and report continuous data in real time. From vital signs to capnography monitors, these technologies help ensure that critical data is collected and documented regularly, so if something goes wrong, the proper protocols can be followed. This can help ASCs track infections and identify incidents as they occur. For example, if an adverse event takes place, monitoring systems can flag the incident and report the data of when and where it happened on an easily accessible dashboard.
With this technology in place, ASCs can set their own incident alarms, document details to the second, and meet even the most stringent patient safety regulations and requirements. This can help staff better react to and even prevent incidents.
Automation can take many forms. For example, ASCs could use automation technologies to identify when sterilization and sanitation protocols must be carried out. Automation can also help improve patient communication and engagement. Automated texts can remind patients to follow pre- or post-op instructions, such as when to fast and for how long or when to take certain medications.
Automated inventory management systems can help ensure crash carts are always stocked and expired medications are disposed of. Automation, such as artificial intelligence, can analyze patient data in an EHR to flag potential patient safety risks or support medical decision-making. Automation can streamline scheduling and ensure that even critical tasks, such as timeouts, are performed properly in the operating room.
The key for ASC leaders is to determine where automation is needed. Assess and evaluate every aspect of your perioperative process and note areas where automation could make a significant difference, whether it’s to streamline processes or ensure compliance for patient safety.
Beyond enhancing patient safety, ASCs need to comply with strict regulatory requirements and national patient safety standards. Technology can help here, as well. Here are some practical strategies ASC leaders and administrators can combine with modern technology to improve compliance:
Embed safety checklists and time-outs into digital workflows.
Use dashboards to monitor safety metrics tied to CMS and the ASCQR program as well as AAAHC, ACHC, QUAD A, and Joint Commission patient safety goals.
Leverage a quality reporting system for tracking infection control and adverse event documentation.
Schedule regular staff training through compliance platforms and use learning management systems to build custom courses or resource databases.
Identify patient safety areas that could benefit from automation, such as documentation management or reminder and alert systems.
Track compliance adherence by integrating with regulatory databases.
Replace paper logbooks with digital logbooks to improve inventory tracking and documentation.
Run analytics tied to compliance and patient safety KPIs to identify areas of improvement and adherence gaps.
Encourage the use of task management systems to standardize compliance workflows and help staff remember and follow the correct safety protocols.
Integrate ASC patient safety initiatives into every workflow to foster a culture of safety in healthcare.
Safety should be at the core of everything an ASC does. ASC leaders and administrators can ensure this by baking safety directly into the organization’s culture. A culture of safety, combined with powerful, ASC-specific technology, can help leaders support always-on compliance, reduce risk, and improve trust, efficiency, and patient outcomes at scale.
It’s time to turn safety standards into everyday practice. With SIS Comply, your ASC can digitize checklists, streamline compliance tasks, and keep patient safety at the forefront. Learn more today.
How can ASC leaders cultivate a culture of safety?
ASC leaders and administrators can foster a culture of safety in healthcare by demonstrating a compliance-first approach to everything, from policy to process and beyond. That philosophy can be directly integrated into workflows with technology that helps maintain adherence to safety protocols.
EHRs can help ASCs maintain clear, accurate, and comprehensive patient records, while compliance software can provide staff with intuitive tools for staying on top of complex regulations, safety standards, and accreditation requirements. Monitoring systems and automation can also help ASCs track critical data and streamline management to ensure compliance at every level of the organization.
Think about interoperability. You can adopt a variety of technologies, but if the individual tools don’t work together holistically or with other healthcare systems, it can cause more disruption than necessary. Make a list of what technology you could benefit from, tie it to compliance and safety goals, and evaluate vendors and partners carefully before making any decisions.
EHRs can help ensure accurate patient data, which can help prevent medication errors, such as giving a patient a medication to which they are allergic. Infection and sterilization documentation can be improved with the help of monitoring systems that track when safety protocols have been performed and by whom.
Wrong-site or wrong-procedure events can be avoided with the help of EHRs and automation, while team communication can be improved by the use of compliance software that ensures all data is recorded and shared accurately.