BrightSpring places quality first across all our operations. Our goal is to ensure every individual we serve receives the right care – at the right time – in the safest and most appropriate environment possible.
Our industry-best clinical quality and compliance teams oversee extensive quality improvement, analysis, and audit functions that drive high quality services across all business lines.
Our “Quality First” framework drives decisions in investment, training, hiring, and growth by keeping all aspects of the business focused on what improves patient outcomes and patient experiences.
BrightSpring’s Clinical and Quality team is dedicated to measuring and improving key clinical quality indicators across all lines of business.
The expert team, along with a “Quality First” focused culture throughout operations has led to strong quality results and ultimately better clinical outcomes for the patients and clients we serve each day.
We strive to ensure that every person we serve receives the right care at the right time in the safest environment possible. In our Quality Report we detail the continuous quality and safety efforts and improvements to demonstrate how our Quality First framework is instrumental in our success.
2020 BrightSpring Quality Report
At BrightSpring, we serve the most complex populations, markets defined by increasing needs, higher demand and consistent growth:
Our patients’ safety and well-being are our top priorities. We take all reports related to patients under our care seriously. We work to thoroughly investigate and quickly correct any issues that may affect the well-being of our patients.
As part of our initial orientation and ongoing training protocols every new employee – regardless of location and team — learns in great detail about BrightSpring’s mandatory compliance and reporting policies.
While we strive for zero issues, unexpected incidents can happen, particularly for a provider like ResCare Community Living, which serves clients with complex needs on a large scale. When these rare incidents occur, we have systems to report, review and, if necessary, address what has occurred, so we learn from them and ensure they don’t happen again.
BrightSpring operations must comply with all company, local, 13 state and federal rules/regulations that promote the protection of workplace health and safety. Our workers must be familiar with safe workplace practices and safety regulations related to their job and to their working environment.
It is important for our teams to report to their supervisor any workplace injury, as well as any situation presenting a danger of injury so that it can be corrected immediately.
BrightSpring takes all outbreak threats very seriously. While we have always had an organizational disaster and pandemic plan in place, our Outbreak Preparedness and Action Committee is working to respond to both the rapid pace of information and the concerns that people in the community have about COVID-19. The Committee is focused on preparedness plans for each business for the safety and care of employees, customers, patients and clients.
BrightSpring released a revised company-wide Infection Control and Prevention Policy, updated travel policies and visitor management protocols at all locations. These policies continue to be updated in response to the fluid situation and provide enhanced protection for the patients, clients, customers, communities and employees we serve.
We have also added dedicated regional nurses and quality assurance personnel to increase clinical oversight (including over 30,000 new hires during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic), increased management salaries to improve recruitment and increase accountability and implemented new organizational models in every agency to decrease caseloads and increase patient touchpoints. This helped us continue to recruit and retain dedicated professionals while experiencing overall COVID-19 infection and hospitalization rates much lower than the general U.S. population, despite serving a highly challenging population with 24/7 care. Specifically, as of February 28, 2022, we have seen patient and employee infection rates of only 6.1% and 8.1%, respectively – approximately 1/3 of the U.S. case rate of 23.9%. We believe these rates are a testament to our staff’s commitment to BrightSpring’s mission and the care we provide, no matter the healthcare environment.
Central to our safety protocols is our Critical Incident Reporting System, which ensures management is aware of all critical incidents as they are reported. This database automatically sends notification of reported and updated critical incidents to Executive Leadership, Line-of-Business Leadership, and other support departments such as Legal, HR, Quality, and Risk to increase visibility and allow for more immediate action. We encourage all of our employees to consistently update each incident as more information becomes available and as it is completed. We assess whether we have policies and training in place that could have prevented the incident or whether such policies need to be enhanced or created.
Simultaneously to reporting internally, depending on the issue, we require the incident to be reported to appropriate regulatory bodies and/or law enforcement.
As necessary, we implement a corrective action plan and work with appropriate regulatory bodies/law enforcement to execute it. Staff members involved in critical incidents are suspended throughout any investigation(s) and, if required at the conclusion of the investigation, are terminated.
We also have a dedicated Compliance Action Line “See It, Say It,” which is open to anyone to file a complaint or report a problem. This phone line is in BrightSpring’s Code of Conduct, is part of mandatory annual compliance training, is visibly posted in all BrightSpring locations and is featured across all BrightSpring websites.
BrightSpring’s Compliance Program is designed to prevent, detect and correct violations of law, regulation of Company policy and to promote an ethical culture within the organization. The program is modeled after the Department of Health and Human Services’ Elements of an Effective Compliance Program.
We establish strong expectations for all leaders within the Company of commitment and implementation of the Compliance Program. We have a zero-tolerance approach to violations of our Code of Conduct and Compliance Program tenants.
We employ more than 150 full time clinical and quality support professionals team members and 44 compliance team members conducting hundreds of quality, clinical and compliance audits across our provider businesses, approximately 190 pharmacy compliance audits of company-wide field operations annually, and monthly record reviews of 10% of patient charts – in all of these audits the quality and compliance teams using recently created applications to enter and track data.
BrightSpring employees, contractors and vendors are expected to report allegations of fraud, waste, abuse and potential workplace concerns and compliance reports can be submitted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
BrightSpring’s processes and technology make us a leader in innovation with electronic health record solutions, signature programs, data analytics and reporting, smart home monitoring, telehealth, and clinical, behavioral and care management. Our integrated suite of workflow and care management solutions connects people and homes with high-tech, high-touch care.
The Compliance Department manages monitoring and audit tools to better assess the operations’ compliance with these requirements. Any reports of misconduct are investigated by our dedicated Investigations team.
The tools focus on specific compliance areas:
Compliance education is a key element of an effective compliance program. All employees are required to take annual Compliance Training and our Compliance Department analyzes test results to determine if specific areas of training need to be further emphasized.
The department creates and delivers proprietary training programs to improve employee and patient well-being, including the “You’re Safe, I’m Safe” training which teaches staff how to manage, deescalate, and avoid behavioral crises.