Melissa Fitzpatrick - Blessed by Incredible Role Models

Melissa Fitzpatrick has been a registered nurse since 1977, after she received an Associate’s Degree in Nursing from Gwynedd-Mercy College. She went on to earn her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1979, also from Gwynedd-Mercy and then her Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

The top priority of any nurse, she says, is to meet the needs of patients, families, and communities. She decided on a career in nursing after discussing her options with her parents, and initially decided to become a pediatric nurse. “I did not last long in pediatrics,” she recalls, because we lost several children to leukemia in my first clinical rotation.  I did however, fall in love with the adult critical care environment.” By the age of nineteen she was a staff nurse in an Intensive Care unit in Philadelphia, where she was taught by those who became her professional mentors and role models.

One such mentor, Melissa Fitzpatrick says, was her Chief Nurse Executive, Carol Hutelmyer, who took a chance on her and let her establish a critical care course. Fitzpatrick loved the teaching experience, and her ability caught the attention of a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing faculty member who heard her present on sudden cardiac death. Melissa took her suggestion that she submit her presentation to a national critical care conference. It was accepted, and “launched my speaking career and gained my access to an incredible network of colleagues and role models.”

Today, Melissa Fitzpatrick is a nationally recognized consultant, speaker and author of dozens of publications and several book chapters. She is the President and CEO of Fitzpatrick & Associates in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she also makes her home.

Can Technology Assist You in Meeting Your Patient Safety Goals?

Today’s healthcare delivery system is complex and multi-dimensional with many competing demands, regulatory requirements and caregiver challenges. Every day, healthcare leaders strive to achieve positive patient outcomes, to enhance the patient and family experience and to do so while controlling costs and optimizing caregiver efficiency and satisfaction. In doing so, healthcare leaders and their teams are held to clinical and financial standards of practice and must publicly report their performance against those standards. All efforts are to assure that care is safe and effective and that true value is derived from the services delivered.

Value Based Healthcare

The demand for value based healthcare has never been greater. Delivering evidence based care that is based on quality and not quantity and on value not volume is a necessity in order to meet the escalating needs of patients and populations as well as to avoid the financial penalties incurred when value is not achieved. In order to demonstrate and document value, healthcare teams must measure what matters and share their results with transparency.

Measure, Measure, Measure

It is not enough for healthcare teams to measure results. More than that, the measures must be meaningful and tracked over time. Continuous quality improvement can only be achieved when benchmarks are defined and when performance is monitored and managed in a sustainable way. Many of the measures that matter are defined by leading national organizations and accrediting bodies such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and The Joint Commission. Healthcare teams are monitoring performance around specific far-reaching diseases such as

● Diabetes Mellitus
● Hypertension
● Heart Failure
● Coronary Artery Disease

as well as around prevention and screening goals such as influenza and pneumonia vaccination and breast and colorectal screening. Measuring performance using these and other measures informs most population health efforts underway across the country in efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act and to realize the financial incentives achieved when the focus is on health and value and not on illness and volume.

The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals

To assist in all of the efforts mentioned above and to provide guidance to healthcare teams as they strive to deliver evidence based and cost effective care, The Joint Commission has set forth national patient safety goals to address high risk, high volume and preventable adverse events. The 2016 National Patient Safety Goals are to

• Identify patients correctly
• Improve staff communication
• Use medicines safely
• Use alarms safely
• Prevent infection
• Identify patient safety risks
• Prevent mistakes in surgery

Using Technology to Achieve the National Patient Safety Goals

Despite individual providers’ and teams’ best and most sincere efforts to do no harm, unfortunately, errors and mistakes in healthcare delivery still occur at alarming rates. This is not a new revelation to those at the frontlines of patient care. New measures, new monitoring techniques, new quality improvement frameworks, new team accountabilities and new technologies have all been brought forward to address the patient safety needs of those that we serve. In particular, new technology is introduced every day in order to enable best practices around each of the national patient safety goals mentioned above. Hand hygiene solutions help to prevent infection. Phone and texting technology help to improve communication among team members. Medication dispensing technology and medication reconciliation tools help to assure that medicines are used safely.

In the operating room, efforts focus on team communication and pausing before beginning, assuring and marking the correct site of surgery and adherence to surgical checklists and defined evidence based pathways for all surgical patients. 3si is a technology that facilitates safe care in the OR and that addresses these surgical safety mandates in an easy to use and intuitive manner. Adoption of the 3si Hub system’s multi-user voice command technology has yielded standardized workflow, enhanced teamwork and communication and improved documentation in the OR. Surgical teams and patients benefit from the results.

For more information about the 3si Hub to assist you in improving surgical safety,

please contact Tim.caver@cliniflowtech.com