Ball Memorial Hospital Proves Compliance, Earns NIAHO Accreditation, Documents Performance Improvements with SmartDraw

Quality of care and patient safety are top priorities for Clarion Health System's Ball Memorial Hospital (BMH), which provides a full range of health services to the people of East Central Indiana. BMH clinicians and administrative staff use SmartDraw regularly to keep best practices top of mind in every department—and to achieve the extraordinary goal of becoming the first hospital to Indiana to achieve the impressive NIAHO credential.

BMH is a busy—and impressive—Midwestern health system that fuses a caring community feel with cutting-edge surgical techniques and practices at all of its hospitals, medical group practices or pharmacies.

As every one of BMH's 3,000 professionals knows, documenting continual performance improvement initiatives is a crucial step to providing world class patient care while achieving compliance, accreditation, awards and reimbursement from governing bodies.

Visualizing Performance Improvements

Over the course of 20 years, BMH' performance improvement teams have tried a wide variety of performance improvement methodologies to show accrediting bodies the visual evidence that the system has either changed processes for the better or is holding the gain on improvements made earlier.

Since 2005, SmartDraw has been BMH's tool of choice for this important process visualization.

"We use SmartDraw for extensive development of performance improvement (PI) team processes," says Dlynn Melo, a registered nurse with a master's degree in information science who serves as a liaison between clinical practitioners and information technologists for many of the clinicians' software needs. "We always have workflow that needs to be refined and tweaked, and SmartDraw gives us an easy and quick way to document and act upon those changes."

As an example, Cherlynn Bennett, RN and PI Coordinator in the Office of Quality and Safety, uses SmartDraw to assist with the flow of patients after joint surgery.

"We use SmartDraw's flow charting capabilities to trace patients from the beginning of a process to the end (case management) in order to evaluate inconsistencies and duplications," Cherlynn explains. "We do this to make a patient's experience more standardized and streamlined to provide the best possible care."

Figure 1. A portion of one of BHM's many process flowcharts created with SmartDraw.

Achieving NIAHO Certification

BMH has taken its performance improvement processes a giant step further by gaining certification through a new hospital accreditation program, the National Integrated Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations (NIAHO).

NIAHO(sm), a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS) approved accreditation service privately administered through international firm Det Norske Veritas, encourages innovation within individual hospitals while helping them take advantage of system-wide best practices. It is the first hospital accreditation program in the U.S. that integrates the internationally-recognized ISO 9001 Quality Management System with the Medicare Conditions of Participation, making it the first and only hospital accreditation program that requires continual quality improvement on an annual basis, instead of every three years. NIAHO is designed from the ground up to drive quality transformation into the core processes of running a hospital.

"Achieving NIAHO certification is a great honor and not easily attainable. In fact, we are the first hospital in Indiana to achieve both ISO certification and NIAHO accreditation. Throughout the application process our teams used SmartDraw to create flow charts and other visuals that documented quality and safety procedures in a way that NIAHO teams could easily interpret them," said Dlynn.

A Key Compliance Tool in Many Areas

BMH has counted on SmartDraw to help visually communicate processes like job responsibilities and lines of accountability with flow charts, Gantt charts and scattergrams for project management and reporting purposes within many departments, and to create professional-looking flyers and patient teaching materials.

For patient and staff educational materials

"SmartDraw is definitely not confined to the PI department," Dlynn says. "People who aren't in hardcore PI mode may suddenly be expected to create flowcharts showing how to aestivate a patient. Luckily, there is widespread access to SmartDraw so those processes aren't an issue to illustrate."

BMH recently had some staff members conduct extensive research and publishing in clinical settings and needed an easy way to drag and drop anatomical drawings using SmartDraw's Netter Images found in its Healthcare Edition.

"SmartDraw works really well for this purpose," Dlynn says. "It is perfect for our population and its eclectic needs. People can always manually try to download medical images, but that takes a very long time and can be very expensive. SmartDraw is a much smarter way to get this done."

A Star in the IT/IS department

BMH's IT/IS department uses SmartDraw for floor planning and diagramming of the BMH computer network as a means to communicate space and network connections.

"One of our interface pros who has more than 150 interfaces was able to create a schematic diagramming 2-way and multiple parts messages from two different engines and 100 different applications," explains Dlynn. "He was able to do it very quickly and without burdening the system with SmartDraw."

There are other tangible benefits to using SmartDraw for the IT team as well. Dlynn handles the software upgrades for clinician and staff members and spoke to SmartDraw's reliability, cost effectiveness and ease of use as well.

"This year it was really beneficial to have SmartDraw because Microsoft licensing fees had gone up and we had scaled back on the MS Office suite. SmartDraw enhances or augments some of the Office applications that we just don't need to purchase separately anymore. And unlike Visio, SmartDraw isn't expensive or complex for a departmental setting. Once it's downloaded, it's basically trouble free and doesn't require an immense amount of network memory."

Dlynn appreciates that SmartDraw is icon-driven and uncomplicated. "SmartDraw is so easy that we don't even have anyone teaching it. It's a self-supporting application that requires no handholding."

To illustrate her point, Dlynn notes that BMH uses a software product called "Magic Tracker" that allows the IT/IS department to track technology issues by the caller or type of incident.

"In one year we've had only tickets associated with installation - meaning, people requested SmartDraw access - but none associated with problems. This alone probably saves us hundreds of hours a year just in IT time that we can otherwise spend on technologies that are more patient care oriented. That's huge."

Dlynn admits that assisting clinicians and others with SmartDraw is but "one of the 42 things that she does," which includes providing support for electronic medical records.

"SmartDraw is a great value to us because it helps everyone clearly see and understand the many important processes that lead to outstanding patient care. It shows all accrediting bodies that we are fully in compliance and that we go above and beyond current standards to improve care."