Powering Professionals

Case Study: Jennings Hospital - now Ochsner American Legion Hospital (OALH)

Industry

Healthcare

Location

Louisiana

Overview

Jennings American Legion Hospital (JALH), now Oschner American Legion Hospital, is Louisiana based 49-bed non-profit acute care hospital. Since opening in 1960, it has been fully committed to a culture of excellence and delivers the highest quality of care to its patient community. JALH is fully accredited by The Joint Commission and offers a wide range of inpatient and outpatient services. JALH is the only hospital in the country owned and operated by the local American Legion Post.

JALH came to the Immuware Team with the goal of eliminating their highly manual paper and spreadsheet tracking process and turn it into a robust, real time, highly intuitive employee health compliance tracking system to transform their yearly influenza immunization campaign. Together, JALH and the Immuware team worked to implement a solution that fully automated data capture and monitoring and enabled complete visibility and accuracy with real time view of compliance status and employee records. Once implemented, 100% paperless became a reality for the Employee Health team resulting in increased reporting, accuracy and transparency and secure online storage of all records and documentation for the entire organization.

Business Challenge and Objective

JALH is a small rural hospital with several offsite clinics. As is often the case, employees may have multiple duties. This is true in the Infection Prevention and Employee Health Department. Along with all of the Employee Health duties, the Employee Health Nurse assists in patient call backs, workers compensation cases and facilitating their outpatient telemedicine program. With over 700 healthcare personnel to track, JALH’s Employee Health Nurse was overwhelmed with paperwork and filing.

Records are maintained to assure compliance for all employees, physicians, volunteers, students, contract personnel and independent providers that care for their patients. Onboarding consists of determining immune status for a variety of vaccine preventable conditions and screening for infectious diseases. Immunizations are offered to the employee body, as in the case with influenza. With their aggressive annual immunization campaign, activities require meticulous record keeping.

JALH had one nurse reporting to Infection Prevention who was drowning in paper. Papers to be input into a spread sheet, papers to be scanned, papers to be filed. It was a compliance nightmare. Real time data was very difficult to achieve. Flu season was especially challenging with one Employee Health Nurse administering approximately 500 immunizations and all the tracking that went with that process.

After realizing that their way of handling employee records was outdated and inefficient, JALH sought out Immuware to help with the various challenges that were afflicting the organization, including:

• Filing was not kept up to date due to scarcity of resources – Goal to keep records current and up to date
• Mounds of paperwork and data waiting to be input into a spreadsheet – Goal to be paperless
• Inability to assess compliance “on demand” and lack of visibly to the details until all data was aggregated and tabulated manually – Goal to have real time visibility and transparency to easily view compliance status

Approach

During implementation, Immuware worked closely with the Jennings American Legion Hospital team to meet their organizational strategic goals.

The Immuware Team conducted a kick off meeting started off the project. The combined team held requirements gathering sessions to understand JAHL’s specific needs and identified the optimal configuration. The project team defined the compliance process workflows and regulatory compliance requirements by job role, what historical data needed to be brought into Immuware, how to set up the organizational structure and requirements. Status meetings helped to identify specific vaccinations and surveillances that Immuware configured specifically to the flows of the organization. Check ins throughout development testing and rollout with the leadership of JALH helped to foster teamwork and better understanding of how Immuware can help benefit the JAHL organization.

With Immuware, JAHL finally has a secure tool to transform the way they manage their immunization campaigns and their reporting to management, the CDC and regulatory auditors. They now have:

  • Efficient and quick processing of participants during campaign events
  • Security by role to protect the employee’s health data information
  • Integrated management and reporting tools for a reliable, streamlined, and compliant flu vaccination tracking campaign
  • Instant “single click” NHSN Flu and compliance reports for automated compliance with the Centers for
  • Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations and the National Health Safety Network (NHSN) reporting requirements.
  • A smart “all-in-one” electronic form that collects consent, declination, received elsewhere, and exemption information.
  • Instant “single click” NHSN Flu and compliance reports
  • Supervisor Compliance Dashboard (optional)
  • Reporting that provide for real-time compliance reporting
  • It handles all first time, annual, boosters, and shot series.
  • Tracking of externally administered documentation of immunity, vaccination dates, titer results
  • Automated reminders to workers who are due for an immunization action.
  • Next Step and expiring queues for quick access and monitoring of non-compliant employees

Results

As a direct result of implementing Immuware, JALH’s Employee Health Nurse is now organized and always current with documentation. JALH’s administrator can easily pull reports on their organizations compliance and flu season had Phyllis, head of Clinical Systems Improvement at JALH had this to say: “I cannot say enough about the degree to which this system has improved the efficiencies in this department. And the big bonus is that the system is electronic so users can access it from anywhere. I can review vaccination status as needed during the influenza immunization campaign. Creating reports for mandatory reporting to NHSN for healthcare influenza immunization is tallied up by the system, no more tick marks! As manager of the Employee Health Program I find Immuware extremely beneficial and cannot imagine reverting to a paper system.”

Immuware now provides the Jennings American Legion Hospital’s administrators and clinicians with:

1. Real time access to metrics and data that empowers administrators and supervisors to act quickly and achieve desired results

2. Immediate access to precise and reliable immunization data and the ability to view compliance status in real time.

3. Electronic signature and content storage within the system,

4. HIPAA secure online storage of all employee, active, LOA or terminated, health records,

5. Quick online access to specific personnel’s compliance performance with uniform status terminology: vaccinated, exempt or declined,

6. 100% clinician mobility by working on any desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone, regardless of operating system,

7. The ability to instantly scan photograph and upload paper compliance document images and/or externally administered vaccination certifications and attach to individual employee records,

8. Dashboards that provide tailored views of immunizations by dept, employee position or employee type,

9. Transparency of to data for analysis of employee immunization data for better identification of bottlenecks,

10. Embedded National Health Safety Network (NHSN) report format

Business Impact

Immuware helped to transform JALH’s previously manual and spreadsheet workflow into a completely secure, efficient, highly organized and easily accessible employee health process and software compliance system. Administrators had clear insight into how their organization was doing with their compliance and were confident in the system and its ability to pull reports and aggregate information for them.

Since their successful Immuware rollout, Jennings American Legion Hospital has:
• Achieved a remarkable 98.7% compliance rate for flu vaccination

• Saved .5 hour/day during the flu season in administrative duties. September to the end of March resulting in approximately 70 hours saved in administrative tasks

• Reduced time spent calculating the CDC’s NHSN reporting metrics by 4 to 8 hours per administrator, annually.

• Improved accuracy of employee vaccination and surveillance monitoring, including elimination of duplicate entries, elimination of the possibility of human error in calculations and other risks related to a manual process.

• Saved IT staff time because Immuware is a SaaS cloud hosted application. Internal technical involvement in ongoing server maintenance or upgrade installs for the software is no longer needed.

• Mitigated risk by ensuring data and attachments are securely stored and accessible on a permanent basis, ensuring OSHA retention requirements are met

• Saved filing cabinet space and storage space requirements.

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