An Illinois hospital found a management grid to be a useful tool to prepare for Joint Commission tracers.

 

When surveyors arrived at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System in Mattoon, IL, in November 2007, the hospital put together a grid for its managers showing surveyor tracer activities for the week and staff participation assignments.

 

This grid provided a cross-section view of each day so that everyone in the hospital knew what was going on in each tracer. This approach alerted managers who potentially had conflicts between survey sessions occurring at the same time, and allowed the managers to find alternate representatives.