Software Managed ILSM
As long as there have been hospitals there has been the potential for fires and loss of life due to fires in those hospitals. There have been many fires with large loss of life (sometimes over 100 lives lost to a single fire), hundreds of other multiple loss of life fires with two, three, or more lives lost and many hundred single loss of life fires. This doesn’t even address the thousands of fires that have occurred in hospitals and healthcare facilities that didn’t result in loss of live but did result in property damage, injury, and disruption to operations.
Historically these fires and/or the resulting death, injury, damage, and disruption are the result of carless smoking; construction activities; code violations; electrical faults; human error; and arson.
Well over twenty years ago The Joint Commission (TJC) responded to several of these issues through changes and additions it made to its hospital and other healthcare facility standards. Specifically, TJC all but banned smoking in hospitals and other healthcare facilities and campuses. Additionally, they instituted new standards requiring proactive evaluations and actions when organizations planned future construction activities and when the identified existing violations of NFPA 101 Life Safety Code . These standards remain in existence today nearly the same as they were first instituted over two decades ago. Similar, nearly identical requirements also exist today in Medicare Conditions of Participation, American Osteopathic accreditation requirements, and DNV standards and AAAHC standards.
Finally, products are beginning which will enable organizations to manage the evaluations, analysis, time frames, and recordkeeping for every violation and construction project they identify for a literally infinite amount of time. This applies universally to the single building hospital, or the multi-building health care campus, or the nation-wide health care organization with hundreds separate campuses and thousands of off-site facilities. One of the real keys to the usefulness of this software is the ability to demonstrate to a surveyor or regulator at any time, that each, and every identified code violation or construction activity has a documented evaluation, selected protection criteria (if needed), and evidence of completion of the selected criteria within the timeline stipulated. If used properly, this type of system makes it impossible to get to survey and not have full evidence of compliance.
Keep in mind that failure to comply with the ILSM standard has been the singular cause over the years for hundreds or organizations receiving Immediate Threat to Life Findings, Compliance Level Findings, Type I findings, Conditional Accreditation Results, and even Preliminary Denial of Accreditation.