Author: Benjamin J. Sintay, Caroline Vanderstraeten, David B. Wiant 👨🔬
Affiliation: Fuse Oncology, Cone Health 🌍
Purpose: The Joint Commission (JC) mandates that healthcare organizations establish and evaluate staff competencies to ensure safe and effective patient care. In the context of increasing sub-specialization and staffing pressures in radiation oncology clinics, it is essential to maintain specialized staff competency records accurately and efficiently. Migrating records to a digital platform improves operational efficiency and patient care. This study investigates the feasibility of implementing a digital competency record system (DCRS).
Methods: An in-house DCRS was released for limited testing in December 2023 followed by full implementation in August 2024. The DCRS was designed with features including enrolling staff in competencies, enabling record uploads by staff and preceptors, and allowing preceptors to approve staff submissions. The DCRS also alerts both staff and preceptors when competencies are incomplete, pending approval, expiring within 30 days, or overdue. Supervisors have exclusive rights to print audit sheets and unenroll staff. Competencies can be configured to expire (typically within 365 days) or include a grace period for newly enrolled staff.
Results: During a 12-month period, 142 records spanning 20 competency types were analyzed for 35 staff members, including therapists, dosimetrists, and physicists. The DCRS demonstrates efficiency with an average webpage load time of 0.584 ± 0.078 seconds across 10 trials on a standard desktop with Chrome and a stable intranet connection. While compliance rate data is currently limited because most submitted digital records are not set to renew until 2025, all 8 competency records renewed to date were submitted before their stated expiration dates, indicating 100% compliance thus far.
Conclusion: This work highlights the advantages of using a digital platform to maintain specialized competency documentation in a radiation oncology department. Future enhancements will include automated email alerts to improve staff awareness and facilitate continued compliance.