Dignity Health, one of the nation’s five largest healthcare systems, is an 18-state network of 10,000 physicians and 56,000 employees who provide patient-centered care at more than 300 care centers, including hospitals as well as urgent and occupational care centers, imaging centers, home health operations, and primary care clinics. Headquartered in San Francisco, Dignity Health is dedicated to providing compassionate, high quality, and affordable patient centered care with special attention to the poor and underserved. As part of this dedication Dignity Health has championed patient safety as a critical component of delivering excellent care. The system’s efforts are perhaps nowhere more evident than that in one of the highest risk areas in healthcare—perinatal services.
Relias OB for Perinatal Safety
In 2011, Dignity Health began working with Relias OB, formerly GNOSIS™, for perinatal content across more than 30 of its facilities, including Relias’ Personal Proficiency Module to assess clinician performance. To date, nearly 100% of perinatal nurses have participated in the training, marking an extremely high adoption rate. With physicians and nurses combined, there are over 1,400 current users and Dignity Health maintains a performance dashboard to track individuals’ progress organization-wide.
“As one of the many ways we provide ongoing education, we have found that the specialized training offered by Relias is able to identify, prioritize, and tailor key competencies for individual staff’s continuing education—thus saving critical time and energy.”
—Barbara Pelletreau, Senior Vice President of Patient Safety
The administrative side of the tool, says Barbara Pelletreau, Senior Vice President of Patient Safety, allows Dignity Health to benchmark performance across individuals, groups, hospitals, and system-wide, and helps the organization continue its mission to deliver quality compassionate care.
Broad Scale Implications
Dignity Health applauds Relias for advancing their online training to a robust platform with detailed, pertinent information that combines knowledge and judgment. The system takes particular interest in the administrative dashboard feature in Relias OB, which allows for intricate examination of data with broad-scale implications. Data from Relias OB allows Dignity Health to:
- Identify performance trends not only within the system but also compared to similar organizations
- Focus on the facilities that may need additional attention for specific learning objectives
- Inform operating decisions about allocation of resources, particularly with regard to training and development.
