4 Methods to Standardize the Rounding Process
Mark Hudson, Director of Client Success
Rounding provides hospitals and healthcare networks with instant access to meaningful trends in reports for their team and on their patients. It’s important though, to make sure that the trends you are seeing are in fact accurate. The best way to achieve that is to standardize the rounding process to ensure accuracy in your trends. Our customers have found that these are the easiest way to standardize your rounding process.
- Simplicity: When determining how rounds will be completed it’s important to keep the flow of the hospital in mind. Plan rounds around the activities of the nurses and clinical staff so that time is not lost skipping from floor to floor rather than moving from room to room. Communication is important as well as so informing individuals of discharges and known charges in advance will avoid delays in the rounding process.
- Mobility: Make it easy for your team. Pen and paper take twice as long, and the data often gets lost and is unreliable. Invest in a rounding solution that offers a mobile solution fo ease of response, the ability to save when interrupted, and tracks completion.
- Consistency: Consistency is the key to adoption. Publishing a defined schedule and adhering to it is instrumental to success. Schedule rounds so that interruptions to the normal daily activity are minimized. Also, keep cancellations to a minimum to ensure rounds occur according to the schedule.
- Responsiveness – Simply put – how responsive is the solution you are using to complete your rounds? Select a solution that has easy-to-use dropdowns and an intuitive user interface to promote adoption within your team. Dropdowns to help ensure that responses are accurate and easy to analyze as data clean-up from typos is minimal.
If your organization struggles with any of the above issues, then re-evaluate how you complete your rounds. Remember, standardization will help a healthcare organization to improve their processes and improve both patient and employee satisfaction and safety.