Before RLDatix

Alicia Bremer is the Quality and Patient Safety Systems Manager at Children’s Nebraska, the state’s only pediatric hospital and medical center. She’s trained as a pediatric clinical nurse specialist who specializes in informatics. Before RLDatix, as Alicia described it, Children’s Nebraska had no policy governance in their legacy system. “The ‘wild west’ is where we started.”

She knew they needed a scalable policy management solution to create structure, establish governance and improve processes to increase transparency, accountability and usability. “It wasn’t just swapping technology,” she said. “It was constructing a tool or technology with the people and the processes.

Implementing RLDatix’s PolicyStat

Alicia and her Systems Administrator co-led the implementation of PolicyStat, RLDatix’s policy management solution, in mid-2021, which standardized policies, streamlined workflows and accelerated data analysis.

Standardized policies: “We didn’t have a template. It was written on Word, could be any font, could be any size, who knew what you were going to get. So PolicyStat makes you have consistency,” said Alicia. What had been thousands of duplicated documents which were undifferentiated between policies and procedures, are now standard with header, subheader, scope of service, agreed-upon definitions and file attachments to clinical references.

Streamlined workflows: “Oftentimes it was the Executive Vice-President who felt passionate about that document. That doesn’t really work … it needs to be your subject matter experts.” Children’s Nebraska used to have up to 13 Vice-Presidents managing, reviewing and approving thousands of documents, line by line, losing time to debating semantics. Now, they have a formal intake process and three committees – each with charter and hierarchy – who don’t need to review content, but instead assign policies by departments (PICU, cardiac, etc.) and focus holistically on bandwidth issues and other barriers faced by subject matter experts.

Out-of-the-box insights: “We started out with using a lot of the PolicyStat data. You have a wealth of data that comes out of PolicyStat – turnaround reports, overdue rates … so we shared a lot of that upfront.”

After RLDatix

Enabled workflow flexibility: “We started having meetings, not in person but actually virtually … they were happening organically within PolicyStat.” Children’s Nebraska’s users now review and approve policies in PolicyStat, eliminating the need to gather physically. Since, they’ve scheduled monthly 30-minute meetings, but they’re canceled 11 out of every 12 months. “They know the system now … it works incredibly well. I’ve go en lots and lots of positive feedback.”

"A part of the RLDatix family is Cheryl Kirchner’s- she was a huge help for us designing meta policies and procedures because we did not have those things fundamentally at all.”

Alicia Bremer, Quality & Patient Safety Systems Manager, Children’s Nebraska Hospital & Medical Center

Gained deeper actionable insights: PolicyStatistics, an add-on that features advanced policy management data, has given faster, more relevant policy access to Children’s Nebraska’s users. Alicia analyzed policy query data, such as ‘Top Searches,’ ‘Top Searches producing no results,’ ‘Policy selected after searching’ and ‘Top policy views’ to understand user behavior better and make policy management changes accordingly. For example, she discovered that a highly queried keyword – ‘CyraCom’ – produced zero results because the corresponding policy about service interpretation wasn’t properly tagged with that queried keyword. “That helps you have those thoughtful conversations.”

Reduced turnaround times and overdue rates: Alicia’s data analysis on workflow metrics, such as number of approval steps, number of days per workflow and number of days per step, has helped Children’s Nebraska with priority setting and reduced their turnaround times and overdue rates. When she noticed a 57-day approval time difference between two workflows – housewide patient care and emergency operations – both of which had the same number of approval steps, she knew where to escalate. “Those are where you can have conversations and seek to understand where they’re having barriers.” These insights led Alicia to set a new escalation path: from policy oversight, to accreditation and regulatory, and then to quality and safety leadership.

"We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Our legacy system didn’t tell us.”

Alicia Bremer, Quality & Patient Safety Systems Manager, Children’s Nebraska Hospital & Medical Center

What’s Children’s Nebraska Hospital & Medical Center Doing Next With RLDatix?

Alicia is focused on decreasing their 3% overdue rate further. She’s leveraging PolicyStat’s email notifications and communication features to proactively ensure their longer, 60-75-day workflows get approved faster. “We’re really pushing, trying to do a lot of messaging around when you get that first notification,” she said. “Being kind of more creative and innovative with saying, ‘You got your notification, get the ball rolling, we can’t be behind.'”

Children’s Nebraska and RLDatix

Alicia transformed Children’s Nebraska’s policy governance with a scalable policy management solution that enables their people and processes with more meaningful actionable insights. They went from the ‘wild west,’ to better transparency, accountability and usability.

"We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” said Alicia. “Our legacy system didn’t tell us.”