Better Root Cause Analysis in Healthcare by Adopting Other Industries’ Best Practices
Root Cause Analysis
The definition of a root cause is:
THE ABSENCE OF BEST PRACTICES
OR THE FAILURE TO APPLY KNOWLEDGE
THAT WOULD HAVE PREVENTED THE PROBLEM
OR SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED ITS
LIKELIHOOD OR CONSEQUENCES.
There are industries that come to mind when you think of strong safety cultures and good root cause analysis. Aviation, oil and gas, and the nuclear industries have learned many lessons about the importance of root cause analysis, sometimes the hard way, to reduce or eliminate risk to their people, the environment, and the company. If you think about the definition of a root cause, you can see how important it is to identify areas in your organization where missing knowledge or the absence of best practices creates risk. To identify and fill in those gaps of knowledge, safety professionals use root cause analysis when mistakes are made and an incident occurs.
Improving Healthcare Root Cause Analysis
Any industry that is heavily regulated and filled with hazards (sound familiar?) needs strong safety professionals who can help their organizations by applying their knowledge or known best practices to fill gaps and reduce risk.
I’ve recently met a couple of safety professionals currently working in the healthcare field that were recruited directly from the oil and gas industry. I think that is a trend we will continue to see. Healthcare as a whole is a few decades behind oil and gas and aviation industries when it comes to truly investigating incidents, identifying mistakes, and taking those mistakes through root cause analysis to find the real underlying issues caused by the absence of knowledge or best practices.
Oil and gas, aviation, and nuclear industries are experienced with creating and implementing corrective actions that are reasonable, measurable, and ultimately verified that they were implemented and working as intended. Why not hire in experts with the knowledge and expertise learned from those other industries to help us catch up?
Adopt Advanced Root Cause Analysis in the Healthcare Industry
Many use TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis as their comprehensive approach to finding and fixing root causes. TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis can be a part of a continuous improvement process that leads patient safety professionals through the steps of understanding what happened, analyzing the data to identify the root causes (absence of best practices or knowledge), and creating and implementing efficient and effective corrective actions to strengthen the systems that were missing something.
Each time you find and fix root causes using TapRooT®, you strengthen your systems and decrease risk to your people and patients. TapRooT® Tools, like our Corrective Action Helper®, give TapRooT® users best practice ideas and knowledge to fix every root cause on our proprietary Root Cause Tree® Diagram.
Please contact me for more information about TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis or for a demonstration of the TapRooT® Software. Just email Marcus@taproot.com, or call 865-539-2139. I look forward to discussing how we can improve your organization.
