Central California 'Safety Net Hospital' is First Public Hospital to Adopt Pavisse to Automate Incident Reporting and Remediation

BAKERSFIELD, Calif., IRVINE, Calif. and SAN FRANCISCO, April 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Kern Medical Center—a 222-bed teaching hospital in Bakersfield, Calif.—is the first public hospital to adopt a unique health IT system called Pavisse™ to manage patient safety, privacy and other compliance-related incidents. Developed by RGP Healthcare, a unit of Resources Global Professionals (NASDAQ: RECN), Pavisse is an end-to-end incident management solution that helps hospitals report, manage and remediate potential violations of any pertinent regulation or standard.

"Our partnership with Pavisse has important implications for patient care long-term," said Kern CEO Paul J. Hensler, who joined RGP Healthcare President Radgia Cook in making the announcement. "As a county hospital our fiscal health impacts taxpayers directly. Hospitals rich and poor, public and private, face rampant regulations, yet every hour spent on compliance is one not spent with patients."

"Like other safety net hospitals, we're facing stiffer budget cuts, more regulations and an increasingly chronically ill patient population. Pavisse provides a means to understand potential incidents, initiate effective corrective action and automate compliance with Joint Commission surveys and more, while saving time and money—assets better spent on clinical work than paperwork. Reporting is intuitive, real-time and on-demand."

"Fiscal health is crucial but not at the expense of quality. Yet errors can be unavoidable even in the best organizations. Kern recently launched a new quality initiative and hired a new chief quality officer whose mission is to drive quality and safety improvement in a nonpunitive environment. In other words, Pavisse will help us make any potential mistakes a teaching moment."

Kern's new CQO, Jonathan F. Aquino, CPHQ, explained: "With Pavisse, we will now be able to deal more effectively with the regulatory paperwork involved in incident reporting plus automate the process of identifying the root causes of these incidents and the remediation process. The system will help us become issue-centric, as compared to incident-centric, allowing us to identify and address troublesome patterns for process improvement in a coherent and auditable manner."

Noted Hensler: "With Pavisse, we now have a real-time healthcare intelligence tool to help us thrive in a regulation-rich environment where pressure to improve quality increases daily."

"Safety and privacy violations pose risks far beyond the legal realm," added Kern Risk Manager, Eva M. Satori, CPHRM, FASHRM. "For instance, nurses were complaining our current system took too long to complete a report. Those are precious minutes not spent on patient care."

Pavisse is the latest in a series of cost-effective and innovative information technologies. Hensler, in league with CIO Bill Fawns, have pioneered at Kern to promote better patient care.

"We look forward with great pleasure to partnering with the forward-thinking team at Kern to continue to improve safety and efficacy as they care for the people of Kern County," said Cook.

About Kern Medical Center
Founded in 1867, and owned and operated by the County of Kern, Kern Medical Center strives to provide the best care possible to a community of more than 850,000. Kern treats more than 16,000 inpatients annually, nearly three-quarters uninsured or Medi-Cal recipients. A designated Level II Trauma Center, the 222-bed hospital operates the only trauma center between Fresno and Los Angeles, handling approximately 43,000 emergency visits annually as well as more than 100,000 affiliated clinic visits. Affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, Geffen School of Medicine, Kern has trained an estimated one-third of all physicians practicing in the county and is one of the county's largest employers with 1800 employees, including three US News & World Reports "Top Doctors."

About Pavisse
A highly affordable and effective incident management system, Pavisse™ has the unique ability to capture incident data and provide required reports to multiple patient safety organizations (PSOs) and state agencies on demand or via a set scheduling process that includes quarterly and annual report capabilities. Healthcare organizations (HCOs) can customize workflow, data collection, analysis and reporting to meet specific needs without the need for complex data transformations or double data-entry. Content-driven, Pavisse can be easily applied to potentially any type of incident management workflow. Innovative reporting capabilities provide executive dashboard overview and monitoring as well as unparalleled internal benchmarking and Pareto graphing for easy-to-understand outcomes and problem area identification. Dynamic automated workflow provides unique issue audit and corrective action plan capabilities, and the CAP Toolkit includes an extensive online archive of global best practices.

An intelligent routing module helps insure reported incidents are appropriately delegated and followed-up. It can be configured to notify the right people and assign workflow for the right incidents at the right time, helping to insure incident reporting mandates are met and the inception-to-remediation incident lifecycle managed appropriately. Circumnavigation architecture lets users move between screens within a specific issue with user-inspired considerations for ease of use and efficiency, significantly reducing the incident resolution cycle.

Other unique features include "Hold" functionality to enable authorized users to place reported incidents "on hold" to preserve data integrity, as well as a reserves module to track the true cost of incidents and associated remediation. A content-rich library includes policies and procedures, as well as a comprehensive archive of pertinent regulations and standards.

Pavisse customers can leverage RGP experts to optimize system use with eight free hours of consulting quarterly with more available as needed. Available via subscription or enterprise model, Pavisse is ideal for HCOs of any shape or size, including acute and long-term care providers, psychiatric facilities, home-health agencies and more. Deployment is quick and painless.

About RGP Healthcare

Headquartered in San Francisco, RGP Healthcare, the healthcare unit of Resources Global Professionals, was created to meet the growing needs of the healthcare sector. Its experts have deep industry knowledge and experience in a variety of disciplines, particularly patient safety and HIPAA compliance, and incident management and remediation. Specialty areas include sentinel event forensic analysis (12-hour response time), 30-day readmissions analysis and prevention strategies, accreditation consulting and automation, ICD-10 education and other professional services that support and enhance the strategic initiatives of healthcare organizations of any size or shape, including acute and long-term care providers. Pavisse™ software solutions helps healthcare providers address a variety of challenges both efficiently and effectively.

About RGP

Resources Global Professionals (RGP), the operating subsidiary of Resources Connection, Inc. (NASDAQ: RECN), is a multinational professional services firm that helps business leaders execute internal initiatives. Partnering with business leaders, the company drives internal change across all parts of a global enterprise—accounting, finance, risk management and internal audit, corporate advisory, strategic communications and restructuring, information management, human capital, supply chain management, healthcare solutions, and legal and regulatory services. Founded in 1996 within a Big Four accounting firm RGP today is a publicly traded company, listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, with more than 2900 professionals, annually serving nearly 2000 clients around the world from 75+ offices. Headquartered in Irvine, Calif., RGP has served 86 of the Fortune 100 companies, as well as many of the nation's leading healthcare organizations.

On the Net
Kern: www.kernmedicalcenter.com
RGP Healthcare: www.rgphealthcare.com 
RGP: www.resourcesglobal.com

SOURCE Resources Global Professionals