You don’t know what you don’t know. And for home-based care providers working toward accreditation from The Joint Commission, manually pulling, organizing and analyzing your own data makes it very difficult to gain a complete picture of your organization.

Also missing is a clear and complete picture of your peers and competitors. The Joint Commission, which offers home-based care providers resources and learning tools aimed at boosting their continuous quality improvement efforts, now offers a new data intelligence tool: the SAFER® Dashboard.

“The SAFER® Dashboard is part of our enterprise data transparency initiative, which we at The Joint Commission also know as DASH: Data Analytics for Safe Healthcare,” says The Joint Commission Director of Strategic Initiatives and Business Operations Ashley Krueger, MPH, PMP. “The dashboard serves up all of an organization’s accreditation data in one place to really allow them to drill into the data and look at different trends across their organizations.”

Here is a look at three key benefits that home-based care providers are gaining today with the SAFER® Dashboard.

Improved data management

The accreditation process from The Joint Commission is done every three years, looking at an organization’s past three years of data and performance. The process of gathering that data, as you can imagine, is time-intensive.

“We’ve heard from organizations that sometimes they’ve had full FTEs dedicated to pulling together and understanding their accreditation data,” Krueger says.

These organizations pull data manually, organizing the data in, say, an Excel spreadsheet, and then analyzing the data themselves. This process is challenging enough for small operations, but for large ones with a multitude of locations, this workload can be prohibitive.

The SAFER® Dashboard helps organizations reduce or eliminate the need for employees to manually manage their data. The dashboard also upgrades their ability to analyze their data, delivering all of their findings in a single accreditation report and ranking their top-10 findings.

These findings provide the intersection between the eye test and the numbers, with the data giving operators the ability to validate or counter the trends they see and hear with their own eyes and ears.

A one-stop, on-demand dashboard

While the SAFER® Dashboard reduces the time an organization spends on manually pulling and analyzing data, it also streamlines the time spent on these data processes overall. Krueger notes that The Joint Commission’s dashboard accounts for organizations that might be using multiple data analytics tools — ones beyond SAFER® — and brings all of that data together in a single, exported file.

“So the dashboard can enhance or supplement the work of someone pulling and analyzing information as well,” she says.

Lastly, the dashboard helps home-based care providers work proactively. With SAFER®, providers can use the dashboard’s “survey analysis for evaluating risk” tool to see not just the severity of their risk, but also the scope, identifying for them risks that are widespread across an organization with multiple locations.

Benchmarking against competitors

The SAFER® Dashboard lets home-based care providers see what they’re doing. It also lets them see how they compare to their competitors by showing the top-10 findings of other organizations within the industry. What’s fascinating and invaluable here is that while a given home-based care provider only goes through its survey process once every three years, the dashboard’s comparison capabilities serve as de facto surveys for operators in their off years.

That is, even if they get accredited this year and won’t get accredited again until 2025, they can use the industry comparisons in 2023 and 2024 to continue their self-evaluation process.

“If they’re experiencing similar findings,” Krueger says, “they might take time to make sure they have their pieces in order around those findings as well.”

Additionally, when a home health agency has access to national trends, even if those trends don’t reflect its own issues, those trends can still guide that organization in its continued pursuit of resources to ensure long-term compliance and success.

“When you know how you’re measuring up against your peers, you know better how to direct your resources to shore yourself up,” she says. With that insight, agencies can work to increase market share and proactively prepare themselves for their next accreditation.

This article is sponsored by The Joint Commission. To learn more about The SAFER® Dashboard, or about pursuing accreditation with The Joint Commission, reach out to our Business Development team by calling 630-792-5070, emailing [email protected] or visiting www.JointCommission.org.