Honoring National Suicide Prevention Month with Real-Time Prevention Tools
September is National Suicide Prevention month. Each year mental health organizations and individuals across the U.S. and around the world raise awareness of tactics to better prevent suicides and to help at-risk people in need of support.
Tragically, 46,510 U.S. citizens committed suicide in 2018. Among that number, Veterans are over-represented as part of the population. Veterans make up 8 percent of the adult population but It is estimated that Veteran suicides represent approximately 22 percent of all suicide deaths in the U.S. Almost one-third of the Veterans who committed suicide in 2018 had recently been treated in a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facility.
In conjunction with the goal to prevent Veteran suicide, the VA supports the national goal of reducing suicide in the U.S. by 20 percent by the year 2025. To make that happen the agency is empowering VA employees by equipping them with advanced tools capable of providing the right patient information at the precise moment it is needed. Through the use of advanced clinical software the effectiveness and coordination of caregivers can be magnified ten-fold.
One such tool is the DSS Iconic Data Suicide Prevention Manager (SPM). SPM is an integrated care coordination platform that injects real time data into key suicide prevention workflows to improve the quality of care and increase situational awareness.
Humans and software have complementary advantages. Humans are creative and empathetic. Software doesn’t get distracted or interrupted and is extremely adept at executing repeated actions methodically with near perfection. Because of this, when humans and machines collaborate, this can truly pave the way to high reliability, efficiency and improvements in productivity and outcomes.
SPM was specifically developed to address several challenges, pain points and information system gaps that lead to vulnerabilities in suicide prevention care for Veterans at high-risk identified by suicide prevention stakeholders. SPM utilizes real-time data, clinical and business intelligence, analytics and push notifications to support the VA’s Risk ID Strategy, an important VA initiative launched in 2018 to identify Veteran’s at risk for suicide. SPM also supports the VA’s journey to become a High Reliability Organization (HRO). Current implementations include Salisbury, Nashville and Indianapolis VAMCs.
To see how the RPC interface makes it easier for Suicide Prevention teams to identify Veterans in need of follow up care, download our poster presentation that details how positive screens are consistently followed up on a timely basis (within 24 hours).
Improvements in software applications and data analytics have already allowed the VA to do things in care delivery that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. Tools like SPM can do the same with suicide prevention. During this National Suicide Prevention month let’s do all we can to ensure such tools are available at every VA facility. That is how the best suicide prevention care that every Veteran deserves can be delivered.
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