HealthScholars: Optimizing Healthcare Vulnerabilities with Improved Performance

Brian Gillett, MD, Chief Medical Officer

Unfortunately, it’s an all too familiar scenario – an anesthetized patient lay on the operating table as a collection of surgeons and specialists conduct a successful aortic valve replacement. After the procedure, as per standard practice, the patient must undergo an intravenous administration of diuretics. However, the diuretic was never ordered as each of the doctors involved assumed another would order the medication. Often, the nurses will notice such an oversight, but for a host of reasons, not question the doctors. In this scenario, the patient developed heart failure, which could have been fatal had the team not resolved the issue at the right moment. “Lack of communication between team members, as in this case, accounts for the majority of latent safety threats and errors in the healthcare sector,” says Brian Gillett, CEO and Founder of SimCore.

As an Emergency Medicine physician, Brian Gillett, designed and directed state-of-the-art clinical simulation centers and error reduction programs. His experience and understanding of this sector’s unique needs inspired him to develop SimCore, an intuitively designed web-based platform for training and debriefing that escalates the quality of healthcare delivery.

By enabling healthcare organizations to effectively manage all aspects of a simulation center and healthcare performance improvement programs from within a single platform, the SimCore system addresses three primary gaps: identification of specific performance vulnerabilities, pairing vulnerabilities to appropriate training modalities, and measuring the impact of training in the clinical environment.

The SimCore platform enables clinical teams to identify healthcare performance vulnerabilities and pair them with targeted training exercises that serve to mitigate threats to patient safety. The system harnesses multi-sourced vulnerability analytics that integrates traditional incident reporting pathways with a cutting-edge real-time clinical event debriefing system.

After a “difficult encounter or communication breakdown incident,” the clinical team leverages SimCore’s advanced debriefing tool to facilitate a high impact structured conversation about the team’s performance during the encounter. The team answers a structured set of questions on communication challenges, clinical management and team performance. SimCore’s multi-dimensional vulnerability analytics engine then compiles the team’s responses, connects to a performance metric tool and maps the responses onto SimCore’s risk assessment applications. Utilizing the information, a real-time dashboard assists the organization to set and implement training priorities for its clinical teams.

“Identification of near misses,” says Dr. Gillett, “is major challenge to preventing medical errors.” As in the aortic valve repair case, faulty communication between doctors after the procedure resulted in a near-miss incident that could have proved fatal. Near-miss incidents are mostly not reported because they do not result in a catastrophic event or because they are subtle enough that the care team is unaware of the errors. However, knowledge and prevention of such situations profoundly decreases the likelihood of catastrophic events from occurring and improves the quality and economizes patient care.

A typical healthcare team is comprised of multiple nurses, physicians, patient care associates, pharmacists, and clerical professionals who arrived in their professions through disparate training pathways. Such disparity broadens the possibility of miscommunications and hence medical errors. Unifying powerful vulnerability analytics with low-cost and highly targeted training solutions solves the challenges of complex critical team based care delivery and maximizes ROI for healthcare organizations. SimCore transcends from being just a technology solution provider and takes on the responsibility of improving the overall quality of patient care. As the only healthcare simulation company that is federal listed as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO), SimCore ensures the confidentiality and privilege protections for the data flowing into their system. “This means that hospitals and providers can engage in honest and accurate reflection” to advance quality.

Extending its capabilities to scale future needs, SimCore is working to advance patient safety by exploring AI and machine learning to pull data directly from Electronic Health Records to further streamline vulnerability analytics which will inform high yield training pathways.