Improve Hospital Quality Management - Outsource Peer Review.

If you're a quality or risk management professional inside a hospital you know how challenging it is to keep up with all of the tasks required to manage a quality operation. That's why risk managers today are increasingly looking to outsource non-critical functions to service providers in order to improve quality while maintaining or surpassing standards.

Outsourcing hospital peer review to an IRO is a perfect example of a best practice that is rapidly being adopted by many hospital risk and quality managers. If your hospital is experiencing sluggishness and difficulties in getting its most challenging peer reviews of sentinel events completed in a timely fashion, an IRO can quickly come in and shift that paradigm for you.

We work with many hospitals across the country that have had sticky sentinel events and cases that have been languishing for 6-9 months with no case resolution because they lack available specialist reviewers or a there is some sort of conflict of interest situation. These cases can easily be solved by bringing in an IRO. The IRO can quickly take over those cases, send them out to board certified specialists in active practice in the same specialty area as the cases to be reviewed, process those responses back into a comprehensive report for a single file or multiple charts and return them to the hospital quality management team, typically in less than 30 days. This provides and incredible amount of value to hospitals that are under the gun to meet their requirements yet are struggling with this process.

If your hospital is looking to outsource peer review, my suggestion is think about moving forward with this right away because frankly, hospitals that don't are falling behind in what is becoming a standard accepted practice in the industry.