Psychiatric hospital Q15 trends

Location & Activity high-level analysis.

Where are patients spending time on your unit?

What are the most common patient activities?

We analyzed VisibleHand’s Q15 database* to look for insights to help you optimize Q15 forms & training. The analysis is the equivalent of tallying observations from a binder containing ~1.5 million Q15s across thousands of patients.

Some findings are obvious (the most common location & activity are Room and Sleeping). Others patterns may lead to better optimization of Q15 forms & processes, e.g., think about adding “admission” as a location to your Q15 form.

Locations:

The next time you update your Q15 form, consider using a version of this location list which covers 99.6% of patient locations observed. If you can only pick 3, Room, Day Room, and Hallway account for 95% of observations.

There were also a number of common locations that were not on our clients’ Q15 form that health techs logged manually using an “other” text box. These give great ideas for future additions or opportunities for training. Example: Office was entered 74 times when there is already a Staff Office option available.

Top self-added patient locations:

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Activities:

These top-10 activities represent 95% of observations from psychiatric hospitals.

If we ignore Sleeping observations, we can see that ~50% of patients’ awake time is spent in activity, e.g., Eating/Group/Walking/etc. while the other ~50% of time is sedentary, Sitting & Laying Awake.

There were a number of common activities that were not on our clients’ Q15 form that front-line health techs logged manually. Many of these are "off unit" activities like ER/ECT/Dialysis, etc. It would be to the manager's discretion whether a catch-all like "off unit" would suffice for documentation, or if this level of detail is required, a potential training opportunity.

Top self-added patient activities:

We hope that this high-level analysis can give you a better sense of patient activity and illuminate opportunities to streamline your current Q15 documentation & training. Please reach out to us via our website if you have further questions about this analysis or would like to learn more about how we help facilities improve Q15 compliance, patient safety, and quality.

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*The data used for this analysis comes from VisibleHand's Q15 Digital Rounding app, is deidentified, and does not contain PHI.