Healthcare workers are heroes. They arrive at work every day ready to provide top-notch care to patients while potentially facing dangerous situations like exposure to infectious diseases and violence from patients, families, and other visitors. To protect their staff and reduce violence in healthcare, hospitals and healthcare systems must systematically gather and analyze incident data to identify patterns and potential risks within their facilities. Then, using this information, they can make data-driven decisions to better support the people in their organization. When hospitals invest in technology with superior reporting capabilities, healthcare leaders can allocate resources effectively and implement targeted strategies, such as enhanced safety measures and specialized training programs, to improve hospital safety metrics. Adopting automated reporting systems can significantly enhance the collection and management of safety data, reduce human error, and send real-time alerts about emerging risks. Let’s discuss how automated reporting systems can reduce underreporting and provide your administrators with the data they need to foster a culture of safety in your facility. 
Healthcare Worker Safety
Workplace violence is a widely recognized hazard in the healthcare industry. It includes any act or threat of physical violence, harassment, intimidation, or other menacing and disruptive behavior that occurs in healthcare facilities. In 2023 alone, almost 82% of nurses reported experiencing at least one type of workplace violence, and nearly 46% reported an increase in workplace violence in their unit since 2022. However, only 1 in 3 nurses reported their employer provided a clear way to report incidents. According to some studies, reporting of workplace violence in healthcare could be as low as 3%. Research clearly depicts the need for better reporting mechanisms and procedures to support our frontline healthcare workers. Reducing underreporting is vital to healthcare systems as it improves healthcare worker safety and patient care overall.
Why Opt for an Automated Reporting System?
Automated incident reporting ensures all threats or occurrences of workplace violence are recorded and addressed. This helps administrative leaders and providers improve hospital safety, employee burnout rates, and quality of care. According to one study, of 2,000 healthcare professionals surveyed, 88% reported experiencing a safety incident but failed to enter it into the electronic system. 45% of respondents claimed to have informally reported an incident to their supervisor, but only 12% of these instances were documented in the hospital’s database. Factors contributing to underreporting include:
- reporting procedures that are overly complex or unclear
- a lack of response or follow-up when reports are submitted
- the high frequency of incidents, making it time-consuming to report each one
By utilizing safety technology with automated reporting and alerting capabilities, hospitals can capture all safety incidents for continuous improvement and ensure staff know help is on the way when needed. 
The Demand for Better Data
With the right hospital safety plan and technology, you can implement both preventive tactics—such as visitor management, full-campus mapping, and wearable duress buttons—and institute automated reporting, which can arm you with useful data to improve safety within your organization. Data derived from automated reporting makes it possible to act proactively by understanding weak points in your safety plan. In fact, the Joint Commission has deemed data collection a necessity in violence prevention, stating that data is key to proactive workplace violence prevention. By analyzing data, an organization can pinpoint the highest-risk locations and departments and identify specific times, types of incidents, and contributing conditions. Collecting these data trends ensures the prioritization of strategies to address emergent risks. Data also makes strategic resource allocation possible—healthcare leaders are equipped with detailed knowledge of the day-to-day operations of their clinic or hospital floor so they can better understand how and why incidents of workplace violence occur in their organization. Implementing a hospital safety solution provides insightful data points that can help healthcare administrators and providers identify the factors that may enable instances of workplace violence. For example, data can help healthcare workers visualize if certain safety events take place in a certain unit or only on certain days. With automated reporting, hospital leaders are set up to strategically assess data and direct resources toward improving hospital safety, including more staff training, additional analysis, or implementing a multi-disciplinary threat assessment team. Quality data makes proactive safety strategies possible. CENTEGIX®, an innovator in healthcare safety, empowers decision-making through technology enhanced with real-time and historical reporting. One dashboard gives you full visibility and analysis into all incidents in your facility. CENTEGIX CrisisAlert™ is a wearable duress button that allows staff to discreetly request help in an emergency, while automatically gathering incident data for alert location, alert reasoning, and alert duration. The CrisisAlert Administrator dashboard also allows administrators to:
- Manage users
- Assign badges
- Define alert types
- Configure responder groups
- Initiate badge training sessions
- Configure IP integrations
- Access the analytics dashboard
The CENTEGIX data analytics dashboard provides healthcare leaders with incident information in real time. By pressing the button on their CrisisAlert badge, staff can instantly send an alert that pinpoints the precise location of the incident, enabling rapid intervention in potentially dangerous situations of workplace violence before they escalate. 
Protect Your Healthcare Organization with CENTEGIX
Addressing violence in healthcare in conjunction with evaluating safety technology can be extremely stressful—but it doesn’t have to be. CENTEGIX provides hospitals with tools to keep their workforce safe. The CENTEGIX Safety Platform™ is an innovative safety solution used by hospitals to create a culture centered around safety, improving employee well-being and retention, and patient care. The CENTEGIX Safety Platform offers precise locating capabilities to ensure an accelerated and effective response during moments of need. The Safety Platform at a glance:
- Discreet, one-button wearable duress badge
- Digital mapping to outline floorplans, safety assets, and incident locations
- Total campus coverage through private LoRaWAN and Bluetooth networks
- Precise locating capabilities activated only during an incident
- Easy installation, with no hardwiring required
- Accessible and automatic reporting collected within an easy-to-use dashboard
- OSHA, CMS, and JC compliant
CENTEGIX Safety Platform offers a multi-layered solution to enhance safety in your facility. The CENTEGIX Safety Platform can secure every square foot of hospital property without concern for Wi-Fi and cellular dead zones. Hospital staff can request help anywhere on campus, from secure ORs to parking lots. The CENTEGIX CrisisAlert wearable duress button provides an easy, discreet way for staff to request help, allowing them to leverage their de-escalation training knowing help is on the way. CENTEGIX Visitor Management enhances the supervision of hospital traffic for administrators. Enhanced Visitor Management is capable of locating all guests, volunteers, and contractors, in real time, through live digital maps. It also records visitor details for future reference. CENTEGIX wants to lessen the burden related to workplace safety, allowing your staff to focus on what they do best—caring for patients. Accessible and automated reporting facilitates collaboration between departments within the healthcare setting so that everyone is working from the same foundational information. Every second matters®. Set your healthcare organization up for success. CENTEGIX is a national leader in developing innovative safety solutions that help keep staff and patients safe from potential threats. Click here to learn more about what we can do for your healthcare organization and how CENTEGIX’s Safety Platform is making automated safety the standard.
