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Hospitals operate in a strict regulatory environment, often with thin margins, to deliver great patient care. This requires multiple teams working in tandem to ensure patients receive the best and safest care possible.
Yet in many situations, teams are too busy to ensure alignment across departments. Manual processes on outdated systems and silos between groups limit the opportunity for the whole hospital to maximize the quality of care.
Additionally, since departments are often short-staffed, manual processes require teams to prioritize high-risk activities rather than explore methods to proactively mitigate risks through performance improvement activities.
Michelle Hilburn, Associate Vice President of Quality, Compliance and Standards at Vastian, has more than 20 years of experience in quality and acute care. She has held various quality-focused roles throughout her career, including Vice President of Quality at HCA Florida Lake Monroe Hospital (formerly Central FL Regional Hospital) and Director of Quality/Risk/Regulatory/Infection Prevention at AdventHealth Daytona Beach.
Michelle has also navigated various challenges in her role, from managing patient safety and care during hurricanes to COVID to a system-wide cyber attack. She is a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) and a Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS).
We sat down with her to hear more about what she experienced when working in the hospital directly, and why she believes Vastian can help take hospitals to the next level.
Q: Your career has spanned more than two decades, and you’ve touched a variety of departments in the hospital setting. What are some of the biggest pain points you saw as it relates to meeting standards?
Michelle Hilburn (MH): What’s lacking is a comprehensive and integrated online platform that allows teams to easily connect the dots and see the bigger picture.
When I worked in the hospital setting, we had to do a lot of things manually, like QAPI, Quality Rounding, and Action Planning - it’s all tracked via Excel spreadsheets, through email, or on paper. This took us so much time to pull the data together to present to stakeholders or surveyors, so we had to prioritize only the high-risk actions. We were stuck in a reactive loop and were limited in what we could do proactively.
There is also the concept of visibility and cost analysis. It’s hard to justify the expense of hiring a new FTE when you can’t easily point to the cost-benefit of having someone on the team to focus entirely on a proactive effort to reduce risk in the long term.
What all of this essentially boils down to is that hospitals are reactive when it’s time to prepare for surveyors. If hospitals lived in a state of regulatory readiness, preparing for a survey wouldn’t be nearly as time-consuming or stressful.
Q: What does “living in a state of readiness” mean?
MH: It means you always have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening, and you’re proactively staying on top of any potential challenges or regulatory requirements.
It really can only happen when you give your providers and clinical staff a full list of quality metrics, like fall prevention strategies and restraint use and management, to help the teams keep their finger on the pulse of these activities every day.
When the list is paired with tools to effectively monitor each activity, and you make it a simple, automated process, you empower these teams to ensure nothing falls behind when they need to turn their attention elsewhere. The reality is that this is exactly what happens when a high-risk situation comes up; Quality leaders get pulled into a different direction and it leaves things at risk of slipping when you’re not paying attention.
It’s just like firefighting; you extinguish one fire, turn around and you have three more to put out.
Having a solution to help you constantly stay on top of the most critical quality standards can empower teams to regularly take action and prevent slippage.
Q: Is there an impact on patient outcomes when hospitals live in a state of readiness?
MH: Yes! There would be a drastic impact on risk reduction. Something as simple as implementing a potty partners program to prevent patient falls when toileting could go a long way. It has a pretty significant ripple effect.
For example, a potty partners program could include implementing hourly rounding on patients to help them go to the bathroom. By not leaving patients unattended at the toilet, you can reduce the likelihood of falls. Falls are not only damaging for patients but also increase costs for the hospital overall due to additional medical needs (sometimes covered by the hospital) and longer hospital stays, which could impact the ER or create a backup if the bed isn’t freed up.
It can also impact Leapfrog's safety grade and the CMS star rating. Honestly, it really is a domino effect.
By focusing on proactively mitigating risk to improve quality and patient safety, and having a platform to monitor and aggregate these activities, you can recognize significant cost savings and improve the hospital’s overall efforts to achieve higher standards.
Q: What inspired you to move out of the hospital setting and join Vastian?
MH: I wanted to take Quality to a national level to have an impact on thousands of hospitals, not just one. This is what Vastian is doing.
The definition of quality is to consistently strive for excellence and promote a culture of zero harm. Vastian is equipping all Quality leaders in hospitals with the tools they need to do this more reliably. I can personally attest to its value; it will completely change the way hospitals think about Quality management.
Q: What does Vastian offer for hospitals and health systems?
MH: Up until now, hospitals have basically been shopping a la carte, using homegrown solutions, or living in a world of paper and binders.
There are some vendors that are good at risk management, some that provide decent systems for communication boards, and some that provide solutions within competency or documentation management, but they’re all one-off selections.
Taking a best-of-breed approach quite frankly isn’t sustainable. It leads to even more fragmentation and requires the Quality teams to still do a lot of manual work because the systems don’t always connect or work with each other. And in Quality, the workflow and hand-offs in activities are critical to finding trends, discovering issues, and remediating deficiencies.
Vastian offers a complete solution in one place that builds a more cohesive hospital. It’s user-friendly, integrated, and comprehensive, which means everyone knows what’s happening. This allows the hospital to maximize benefits in every department.
Unlike other solutions in the market, Vastian is 100% healthcare-focused with a targeted and customized solution for hospital Quality and accreditation. It is not a solution that is also used in other industries or for other tasks or needs.
Formerly known as MediaLab, we’re leveraging all the lessons we’ve learned in the Lab and bringing them to the whole hospital.