Data has become the lifeblood of business operations in recent years. Within the healthcare industry, data has the ability to improve patient safety, streamline processes, increase productivity and efficiency, and much more. But the abundance of data available to healthcare providers, specifically sterile processing departments (SPDs), can be overwhelming — especially for leaders trying to report on it.
Jacob Long, Director of Sales Engineering at Censis, is a reporting expert. We sat in on a session with him to review how CensiTrac can help sterile processing and perioperative leaders handle their reporting responsibilities with ease. We’re recapping the highlights for you here to help you make the most of these reporting features.
Fortunately, there is a plethora of reporting tools that are now accessible to SPD leaders. Unfortunately, however, “There’s a lot that goes on…and it can get very confusing,” Jacob said. To help healthcare leaders make more sense of the overwhelming amount of data and reports available to them, Jacob reviews commonly utilized reports for leadership and how each one enables them to make better decisions.
Before we jump into how CensiTrac can help reduce the burden of reporting, let’s review the reporting functionality and capabilities within CensiTrac.
Within CensiTrac, leadership has access to dozens of in-depth, insightful reports, all of which are customizable. Users are provided with numerous options to filter, customize, save, share, export, and organize all captured data — not just from the SPD, but across other teams, as well.
To help users get more comfortable using CensiTrac’s reports, we recommend managers freely explore and experiment with the platform’s reporting capabilities. “Using the different tools and understanding how they affect different reports will help you understand what reports you need and how you can get it,” Jacob said.
Keystone reporting features available within the software include:
With that in mind, let’s review the common CensiTrac reports used by SPD leadership and how they’re empowering them to make smart, data-driven decisions.
Often, SPD and perioperative leaders rely and report on similar metrics regardless of their location. Some of these metrics include productivity, throughput, asset type, and more. However, specific needs can vary from region to region, healthcare enterprise to enterprise, and even from facility to facility in the same community. CensiTrac easily captures all of this data, enabling leaders to proactively report on the information to boost success, productivity, efficiency, and more.
Some of the reports include:
Each of these reports highlight for leaders how teams or departments are improving and where improvements need to be made. Every report helps leaders to make sense of an abundance of data and these few in particular demonstrate the power, flexibility, and scalability of CensiTrac’s reports.
“This is a personal favorite,” Jacob said. “I call it the ‘What Went Where and When’ report.” This report only uses three fields and enables leadership to identify where any asset is at any point in time. For example, leaders can utilize the General – Inventory Throughput report to determine which assets were sent to the OB department during the last month. This information allows leaders to see how departments are using assets and how often. The report is simple, yes,” Jacob said. “But it is incredibly powerful, dynamic and scalable.”
Both of these reports are similar in nature and are typically used for sterilization documentation compliance and auditing. A key difference between them is that the Load Compliance report features images and additional testing events while the Sterilization – Load report does not.
Each report enables leadership to not only identify potential sterilization problems, but mitigate them as well. For example, in the Load Indicators Result Summary, users can quickly identify which assets may have failed a sterilization check. With a single click, more information is provided, describing when the asset failed and why. Leaders can then take the proper steps to reconcile and fix problems to ensure proper sterilization and compliance standards are met.
“Utilization rates help leaders with two things: ‘What containers do I need to purchase more of?’ and ‘What containers don’t get used and should be repurposed?’” Jacob says. The Container Utilizationreport relies on careful math to determine how often assets are being used and assigns them a number.
“The utilization rate helps to gauge what we need more of for sterilization trays,” Jacob said. “It gives leadership a good opportunity to evaluate whether they really need a specific tray. And because it’s driven by really simple arithmetic, it quantifies reality and really shows your current situation.”
Data stored in CensiTrac has incredible power — especially for you and your leadership team. The robust, flexible, and scalable nature of the platform enables you to manipulate data in a way that makes the most sense to you using filters, parameters, column arrangements, and more. And each report can be exported into Excel for additional organization and manipulation so you can have data look exactly the way you want.
CensiTrac also ensures everyone is kept in the loop about how assets are being used. Leaders can have certain reports be automatically reported and sent to specific individuals at any point in time. For example, leaders can have a Load Indicator Report Summary sent to the OB leadership team to inform them of instruments that failed a sterilization check and why at the end of every month (or sooner if wanted). This enables OB to make necessary improvements that ultimately result in a better patient experience and an increase in safety.
What leaders are able to do with CensiTrac’s report features is seemingly endless. To get started, Jacob has a simple suggestion: “Get comfortable! Familiarize yourself with the reports you need and go experiment. Remember, you’re not going to break it!”
Should you ever need help with CensiTrac’s reporting features, you can always contact Censis Support for assistance.