Cheryl Reinking serves as the chief nursing officer for El Camino Hospital. She has served the hospital in progressive nursing leadership roles for the past 25 years. Cheryl received a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Illinois Wesleyan University and a master’s degree from San Jose State University. She’s a member of the El Camino Hospital Community Benefit Advisory Board, Integrated Nurse Leadership Program Board and Private Duty for Pathways Home Health and Hospice Board. Cheryl is also certified by American Nurses Credentialing Center in advanced nursing administration.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, nearly 1,000,000 patients in the U.S. fall in the hospital each year. The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare also indicates that patients who sustain an injury from a fall add 6.3 days to the hospital stay and cost around $14,000.
Fall prevention methodology is reactive in nature – most fall assessments lack patient context in real time. However, prescriptive analytics represents a true solution by enabling proactive care management based on key patient-centered factors– including historical falls data, fall risk assessment, and bed exit alarms.
Cheryl Reinking, CNO, will detail how El Camino Hospital, a 420-bed California hospital, transformed its fall prevention program and used prescriptive analytics to ensure patients were being proactively and optimally managed. Reinking will also explore the need to go beyond traditional “predictive analytics” into action-focused insights that allow providers to immediately respond and impact patient safety.
Through analytics, the care team was able to predict exactly which patients were at risk for an imminent fall, and alerted case managers of at-risk patients in real-time, which resulted in a 39% reduction in falls within 6 months.
Key Takeaways:
- Key problems with a “reactive” methodology for falls prevention.
- The opportunity to implement prescriptive analytics in falls prevention.
- Designing a falls prevention program that emphasizes data-validated, proactive management to boost outcomes and patient health.
