Patient Safety and Risk Management

The Datix Core Platform is the unifying architecture upon which all the Datix modules are built.

Datix is web-based patient safety software for healthcare risk management applications. The solution delivers the following safety, risk and governance elements through a variety of integrated software modules, enabling you to provide a comprehensive oversight of your risk management activities:

• Incident, adverse event and near miss reporting
• Patient relations
• Malpractice claims management
• Risk assessment
• Safety alerts
• Patient experience and feedback
• Complaints, compliments, comments and concerns

Datix is highly configurable, which means you can tailor it to your structure and unique requirements. Datix delivers a complete patient safety risk workflow, where all improvement actions can be managed together, regardless of whether they are initiated by an investigation, a complaint or an informal comment.Trend analysis is a key part of the information that Datix can provide. Trend reports can be accessed easily, by anyone who needs them. Datix also provides metric-driven dashboards, which can be tailored at user, ward, department or health system level.

Our online incident reporting form has been designed in consultation with our users so that it is simple to use and suitable for both clinical and non-clinical incident reporting. The user interface can be personalised to your needs and workflows amended to match your organisational structure. Incidents can be submitted by anyone in your organisation with access to a computer on your network.Users in each department or site can be given access to Datix to analyse and run reports on incidents, thus encouraging local ownership of patient safety. These users will only be able to view and report on incidents relevant to them, while at corporate level, managers can view incidents that occur across the entire organisation. Datix’s comprehensive security model means you can restrict access to personal information on a ‘need to know’ basis, satisfying the demands of data protection.

Our incident reporting software fully integrates with other Datix modules including claims, complaints and patient experience management software to deliver a comprehensive risk management solution. Information on incidents automatically feeds into the Datix risk register, enabling you to assess and prioritise your risks as part of a comprehensive governance solution.

Producing powerful reports and management information is simple with Datix Incident Reporting and does not require you to export data or use another reporting package. With Datix, you can adapt the format of reports to suit your audience: you can produce detailed reports on each incident for staff on wards, statistical breakdowns for the risk management committee or graphical analyses of trends for the Board.

Datix allows you to record detailed information on investigations, including likely future risk to your organisation, impact on patients and root causes. Support is provided for your internal procedures, allowing you to monitor the progress of any inquiry and keep managers fully informed.Our incident reporting software fully integrates with other Datix modules including claims, complaints and patient experience management software to deliver a comprehensive risk management solution. Information on incidents automatically feeds into the Datix risk register, enabling you to assess and prioritise your risks as part of a comprehensive governance solution.

Automatically generate responses to patients by the appropriate deadlines and monitor your performance

Datix Complaint Handling module provides the tools you need to respond promptly and effectively to  complaints,   generating      correspondence  

and identifying areas where the quality of your service could be improved. Datix lets you know when a reply is due to a complainant, helping you to meet your targets for response times. Deadlines for responding to a complaint are calculated and displayed on the screen when details are entered on Datix. When users log into Datix, they are immediately shown the complaints that are due a response on that day, and also those complaints that will be due a response in the next few days.

Letters and memos are generated automatically when a response is due and stored with the details of the complaint. Letters from complainants can also be scanned in and attached to a complaint. Datix can also interface with your e-mail system, allowing correspondence to be e-mailed directly from Datix and any replies to be filed with the complaint. This means you can easily refer back to correspondence at any time.

Healthcare providers have a statutory duty to monitor and improve the quality of healthcare.

The Datix Patient Experience module enables information from the Patient Affairs Department to be combined with risk management data from the other Datix modules. This then provides the organisation with a comprehensive monitoring service and the ability to pinpoint areas where service improvements are needed.

The Datix Patient Experience module enables information from the Patient Affairs Department to be combined with risk management data from the other Datix modules. This then provides the organisation with a comprehensive monitoring service and the ability to pinpoint areas where service improvements are needed.

The reporting of incidents is fundamental to understanding and managing risk in your organisation.

Just as fundamental is the proactive identification of risks, their prioritization and putting in place action plans to reduce likelihood of recurrence. The Datix Risk Register and Assurance Framework enables you to do this.

Building an assurance framework

The Datix risk register forms a key element of your assurance framework. It enables you to record the major risks to your organisation and the principal objectives that they threaten.

Risks can be captured at every level, from the day-to-day risks faced by the staff on the ground, to the strategic risks at board level or above. These risks can then be prioritised according to a wide range of different criteria, enabling principal risks to be fed upwards to the Board.

Datix allows control measures to be recorded and actions to be scheduled where the current controls are inadequate. It enables you to keep track not only of your position before control measures were introduced, but also of the desired acceptable level of risk after the appropriate controls have been put in place. With Datix, you can even record the current rating for the risk at this moment in time. This unique approach to risk rating delivers a truly dynamic risk management solution.

With Datix, individual units and departments keep their own risk registers. Information feeds into the organisation-wide risk register, giving a prioritised portfolio of risks across the entire organisation. Datix’s comprehensive security means that users in a department or unit can only see their own risks, while managers can be granted permission to view the entire risk register.

To help you identify and prioritise your risks, Datix can use incidents, complaints, claims or even patient experience enquiries already held in the system. These can be linked to a risk, allowing information to be displayed automatically when a user enters a new incident of that risk type. Information in the other Datix modules can be used to prioritise your risk register. For example, you may wish to prioritise certain types of risk by the number of related incidents in the previous year. Datix will enable you to do this without the need to re-key information from another application.

Broadcast information about medical devices and other healthcare safety issues, automatically recording responses and formulating action plans.

Using Datix can help you meet the requirements of the regulators, as your organisation can use Datix to demonstrate that it has systems in place to monitor overall compliance with the relevant policy documents.

Datix Safety Alerts module allows you to record the items of equipment that are in use at your organisation and where they are located. This means you can instantly see whether an alert about a medical device applies to you and which departments or people the alert should be sent to.

Reporting to the Board is simple as Datix generates a wide range of reports quickly and easily. Information from Datix can also be made available on the organisation's intranet, allowing managers to view progress and action plans for alerts. Comprehensive security ensures that only those people who need to view the information have access to it.

The Datix Common Classification System  provides a common language for patient  safety,supporting quality dialogue between  healthcare professionals, leading to a shared  understanding and ultimately influencing safety culture.

The Datix Common Classification System enables the classification of incidents that occur throughout the healthcare environment. Its content has been shaped by healthcare professionals for use in all healthcare organisations, big or small. Incident classification enables healthcare organisations to efficiently identify, analyse and prioritise incidents. An effective classification system plays a key role in patient safety learning systems, providing a focus for harm reduction strategies and leading to improved safety for patients and others in the healthcare system.

The Datix Common Classification System (CCS) was devised in 2001, bringing a standard classification to the many customers of Datix. This ground-breaking innovation introduced the potentially complex concept of incident classification in a simple manner, making it accessible to the wider healthcare community for the first time. Today, the CCS is the most widely used healthcare incident classification system in the world, used by many hundreds of organisations, ranging from small primary care clinics to global healthcare providers.

Since the initial release of the CCS, there have been many developments in the field of patient safety. In 2012, Datix released a new version of the CCS. The culmination of two years’ effort, the new version incorporates new concepts and structures based on research, expert opinion and user feedback.

The Future of Patient Safety

Datix Cloud IQ enables healthcare organisations to generate and implement strategies to enhance the delivery of efficient, targeted and effective care.

" Plan - Do - Study - Act "

Datix Cloud IQ applies the " Plan – Do – Study – Act " process of quality improvement to learning from instances of suboptimal care.

It begins with the initial capture of incidents, patient feedback and surveys and then provides a range of techniques focused on delivering insight, understanding problems and devising cost-effective improvement strategies and goes on to help organisations to implement those strategies and measure their effectiveness.

Datix Cloud IQ is a profound shift in focus for a healthcare risk management application, moving beyond the simple capture and review of data on adverse outcomes towards a managed process of exposing and resolving the issues that lead to those outcomes. As issues are uncovered and improvements are implemented, organisational procedures are updated to embed the changes. This connects policies and guidelines directly to the learning uncovered within the system. Datix Cloud IQ gives organisations a *memory* of what works and – importantly – *why* it works. It opens up learning and improvement to the whole organisation, encouraging all staff, at all levels, to share in this journey.

Datix is a global pioneer in patient safety improvement and Datix Cloud IQ is the result of our continued drive for innovation. It is a culmination of continuous customer engagement, academic collaboration and research. Advances in software and cutting-edge data analytics mean we have been able to produce a range of new tools that drive forward our mission to help our customers protect patients from harm by creating opportunities to learn from things that go wrong.