Completing Patient Acuity Assessment Audits

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Completing Patient Acuity Assessment Audits

Note: Your Staff Manager configuration may not include this optional application. To add this application to your configuration, contact your Clinical Consultant or Client Advocate.

You use patient acuity assessment audits to review and determine interrater reliability. Reliability is the extent to which a test is repeatable and yields consistent scores. Interrater reliability looks at how different raters assess the same patient.

Outcomes-Driven Acuity compares audits to assessments to compute interrater reliability. You can run the Interrater Reliability Report to review the results.

Unlike assessments, audits do not affect staffing data. In addition, you can only save audits when they are complete.

Before Performing an Audit

You should perform audits as soon after a completed assessment as possible. Outcomes-Driven Acuity does not allow you to perform an audit more than 12 hours after the patient’s last completed assessment. If the patient’s last assessment is more than 12 hours old, Outcomes-Driven Acuity alerts you to go to the Patient Acuity Assessment History page and select an assessment within the 12-hour limit.

If you are performing audits more than four hours after the original assessments, you should rely more on the patients' charts as the source of assessment, rather than the patients themselves. Each organization sets their own policies regarding the timeliness of audits.

Outcomes-Driven Acuity marks assessments to indicate the assessment's origin. If someone made the assessment using direct entry, the Last Assessed date and time has DE beside it. If the assessment came from a clinical documentation interface, the Last Assessed date and time has an IF beside.

Note: Any user with Acuity Write access can complete audits.

Auditing an Assessment

Complete the following steps to audit an assessment:

From the Acuity menu, select Patient Assessment Audit. The Patient Acuity Assessment page opens in Audit Mode. You can tell the page is in Audit Mode by the red Audit Mode label.
Select a facility from the menu in the Navigation pane, if applicable.
Select a profile/location from the menu in the Navigation pane.
If you want, you can select a Patient Filter Setting.
- Show Current: Displays all patients on the selected profiles and locations as of now, according to the patient location list maintained by the Registration Import.
- Show Recent: Displays only those patients who were in one of the selected locations within the past eight hours, but who are currently in a different profile and location.
Select the patient in the Patient List. The content pane opens the same outcomes the patient was last assessed on without any selected Likert ratings.
If the Staffing Ratio boxes (RN, LPN/LVN, and UAP) or Patient Type buttons are visible, complete the boxes as outlined in Acuity Staffing Validation with Patient Acuity Assessments and Audits.
Using the outcome set buttons, select the Likert rating that best matches the patient’s state. Select only one Likert rating per outcome. The rating on the far left always stands for the worst state, while the rating on the far right is always the best state. If the outcome is not relevant for this patient, click Does Not Apply. For example, you would click Does Not Apply for the outcome Knowledge: Disease Process if the patient was comatose. To assist in determining the scope of the outcome you should review with nursing judgment, you can click an outcome to see a list of that outcome’s indicators.

Unselected ratings have a white background. Selected ratings have a blue background.
To unselect a rating, click it again (when blue), or click a different rating for the same outcome.

Click Save (Complete) when you have finished the audit.

Printing a Blank Patient Acuity Assessment Audit

Audit Printable View lets you print a blank assessment. You can then use the printout as a manual worksheet while auditing the patient for later entry in Staff Manager.

From the Acuity menu, select Patient Assessment Audit. This opens the Patient Acuity Assessment page in Audit mode. You can tell the page is in Audit Mode by the red Audit Mode label.
Select a facility from the menu in the Navigation Pane, if applicable.
Select a profile/location in the Navigation pane.
Select a patient in the Patient List. The content pane opens the same outcomes that patient was last assessed on without any selected Likert ratings.
Click the Audit Printable View icon . This opens the patient and outcome data in a new PDF window.
Click the Adobe Reader Print icon .

Printing a Completed Patient Acuity Assessment Audit

From the Acuity menu, select Patient Assessment History. This opens the Patient Acuity Assessment History page.
Find the patient, making sure that their Status reads A for Audit.
Click the Print Assessment icon in the patient's row. This opens the completed audit with the Likert ratings selected.
Click the Adobe Reader Print icon .