Blog & Articles

In 2019, the World Health Organization categorized burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. While burnout was a concern before COVID-19, its onset has exacerbated the problem.

According to an ACEP October 2020 poll, 87% of emergency physicians reported feeling more stressed since the start of the pandemic, and 72% reported experiencing more burnout on the job.

On the surface, burnout may be classified as a workforce issue; however, its far-reaching effects can threaten patient safety. In fact, research suggests that physicians experiencing burnout are twice as likely to make a medical error. Burnout should absolutely be considered one of the root causes of medical error.

[5 MIN READ]

Education is a vital to your department’s ongoing clinical performance improvement plans. But the presence of a plan alone isn’t the change catalyst. Through our twenty years of working with large health systems across the country, we have seen that facilities that successfully engage their staff in a new training program have a much higher likelihood of implementing change and positively impacting patient outcomes.

Here are 8 strategies to engage learners in your training program so your staff, patients and facility can receive the benefit you intend.

Once you have allocated resources toward your performance improvement initiative, the next best practice in initiative implementation involves getting your clinicians to support it.

Engaging clinicians early in any initiative is crucial to success. If they decide against participating in the program, morale can suffer. Conversely, clinicians who embrace the program have testified to its worth in improving their practice, saving patient lives and enhancing morale.

The RSQ® Solutions – Emergency Medicine Assessment is a retrospective chart review tool providing a granular analysis on physician practice patterns. The online tool focuses on the 10 highest risk chief complaints in emergency medicine and measures clinical alignment around best practice and documentation compliance with these high-risk patients.

On the journey to improve the quality of patient care, initiatives to enhance clinical performance are necessary. Nevertheless, they can seem to be a daunting task; in fact, these initiatives require several well-orchestrated steps to ensure the program reaches its full impact potential.

Over the past decade, The Sullivan Group has partnered with some of the largest health systems in the country to successfully implement clinical performance improvement programs proven to change clinical practice. While every organization is unique, we have developed a system of best practices for initiative implementation. 

Over the last several months, many of our articles have focused on the importance of redesigning physician documentation systems to increase patient safety and minimize diagnosis-related errors. If you are familiar with The Sullivan Group, you clearly understand the alignment of that topic with our mission and the role we have played with many health systems and EMR vendors to further that mission. However, we also recognize the importance of efficiency, speed, and productivity in the ED and how cumbersome physician documentation systems in the enterprise EHR can lead to an increased frustration and burnout by EM practitioners. 

Our mission at The Sullivan Group is to positively change clinical practice, improve patient safety and reduce malpractice litigation. Because of this, we are often asked by clinical leaders and clients to explore the impact our RSQ® Solutions platform may have on other areas of the healthcare business. A Chief Nursing Officer with whom we have worked for the past several years connected with me at the 19^th Annual NPSF Patient Safety Congress in Orlando, FL, with a similar inquiry. She asked if we had any evidence to support a relationship between our work with improving nursing competency/patient safety and nursing retention rates. 

As electronic medical records have evolved, so have physician documentation methods. Based on our observations in recent years, we have noticed that as organizations migrated away from paper templates, many only developed two or three generic electronic documentation templates for physicians to use (Adult Template, Pediatric Template, Trauma Template).  

Although most of The Sullivan Group’s RSQ® Solutions platform is delivered online via CME/CE courses and clinical performance assessments, there is another major component to the RSQ® Cycle, which involves building clinical risk mitigation strategies directly into the EMR. In 2010, one of our largest clients requested that we develop a library of physician documentation templates for their enterprise EHR system, which happened to be MEDITECH. After several years of development with their medical leadership team, we deployed 137 chief complaint-specific templates with clinical decision support to all 163 emergency departments. Below we have included 2 videos from our President & CEO, Dan Sullivan, MD, JD, FACEP, that outline a few different workflows that can be used by providers to complete their documentation with our PDoc Templates.

Over the last 19 years, clients have watched TSG’s library of online courses grow from 10 courses focused on Emergency Medicine to over 275 courses that span the spectrum of healthcare. We are often asked by clients, “Which courses should we focus on first?” While this answer varies greatly based on the specifics of each client, we have taken the liberty of creating a list of courses/topics that we feel are critical for all patient safety initiatives and tend to resonate with clinicians.