Are you still using Excel sheets to manage healthcare incidents?

Efficient incident management goes a long way in ensuring the smooth functioning of a healthcare organization. Not just that, it is a critical factor in improving the patient experience and overall brand of your organization. With time, the process of incident management has become more complex. It is no longer limited to simple recording of adverse incidents occurring in hospitals.

Here are a few reasons why its time to give up Excel sheets and move on to automated and intelligent systems for managing healthcare incidents.

#1 – Slow and prone to errors

Incident recording through Excel sheets is a manually driven process which makes it slow and prone to errors. It may lead to delays in action and response, re-works and increase the possibilities of incomplete records.

#2 – Offers Limited Features

The process of recording incidents through Excel sheets has become obsolete. An Excel sheet can only help you keep a record of the incidents. It does not offer features to enable the users to capture intricate incident details, decide the follow-up process, coordinate timely response from stakeholders, provide online visibility to relevant parties and use this knowledge for actionable insights etc.

#3 – Sharing information and making changes is not easy

It leads to limiting the availability of incident-related information and intelligence to the person who is assigned the task of capturing or reviewing it. Sharing the information with relevant people takes time. Moreover, making changes in the recorded information also becomes difficult as it will not be reflected in all the spreadsheets at once. The edited sheet with updated data needs to be ‘re-shared’ with the stakeholders.

#4 – Makes incident management confusing and complicated

Incidents vary in nature and need to be recorded accordingly. This task becomes extremely cumbersome for healthcare organizations that still depend on Excel sheets for incident management. It demands the staff to handle multiple Excel sheets resulting in a lot of confusion and making the task much more complicated.

Why switch to an automated incident management tool?

Automated tools will give you a one-stop solution for all your incident management needs. They allow users to track adverse incidents, carry out in-depth analyses, drive proactive measures and report quality parameters. A comprehensive incident management solution will enable you to define and measure quality components and act on these insights for offering Excellent service standards.

Automated incident management solutions will free you from the hassle of manually recording and tracking each and every incident so that you have more time to focus on core quality functions of the organization.  These tools come with features that make sure every incident is recorded along with all the important details and RCA and CAPA are driven on time. They make it easier for you to adhere to the NABH/JCI standards.

With an automated incident management tool, life becomes much easier than how it used to be while working on Excel worksheets.