St. Dominic Hospital Improved Compliance and Effectiveness

Impact:

Since 1946, when the Dominican Sisters purchased the Jackson Infirmary in Jackson, Mississippi, St. Dominic’s has grown into a premier regional healthcare company. St. Dominic’s offers outstanding staff and facilities providing a variety of programs and services including:

• Cancer screenings and treatment
• Cardiovascular care
• Childbirth planning and delivery
• Health and wellness

When St. Dominic Hospital needed a method for preceptors to complete and document skills checklists, they chose HealthStream’s Checklist Management and realized immediate benefits, including:

• Eliminated frustrating paper trail for skills checklists
• Enhanced compliance with recordkeeping needs for skills
• Enabled managers to transfer skills checklists when employees transferred
• Eliminated the need for manager calls and emails about documentation of employee skills checklists
• Enabled multiple evaluators in lengthy training courses to finish different staff training pieces while still recording results on the same e-form for continuity and ease of processing
• Implemented the Checklist Management immediately and easily with no long launch times or complicated roll-outs

The Challenge:

St. Dominic’s management needed a way for its preceptors, or evaluators, to complete a skills checklist with an employee, document it correctly, and then award course credit. Management also did not want paper checklists to get misplaced or to be unavailable to the management team—whether the employee was theirs at the time of the completion or not—and they wanted a method to allow managers to quickly determine if skills training was completed or incomplete. The paper-based system cost many hours of work for managers to complete needed tasks relating to checklist management and created compliance liability in the event papers were misplaced.

Solution:

HealthStream’s Checklist Management was an immediate answer to all our needs. It was perfect, easy to use, and easy to train staff to use.

We just had to copy and paste our content that we already use. It is also very customizable to individual needs,” said Janet Rotkiewicz, Organizational Development & Training, St. Dominic’s.

“As for training the Preceptors, I made a quick training program using Captivate and added this as a SCORM course—assigning to those who were in the student group ‘Validator - Preceptor,’ and requested completion within 30 days of the Job Function date. (Generally 20-30% of our target audience will complete a short, new assignment in the first 2 weeks.) I then sent an email to Nursing Management to let them know the good news, along with access to the training video. The Nurse Educators were the first to use Checklist Management during Nursing Orientation and this is how we trained the students. For staff already in play, we did not actually train them. The online checklist has easy to-follow instructions,” Rotkiewicz explained. 

Results:

Checklists are straightforward tools that support any situation faced in healthcare on a daily basis—from the simplest to the most complex. HealthStream has automated this important process with Checklist Management. No more lost paperwork. No more filing of ripped and coffee-stained hard copies. No more manual tracking of completions. St. Dominic’s automated and improved all of its educational initiatives with the addition of Checklist Management.