News Briefs
News Briefs
Hospitals pledge to improve medication safety
In response to a report on the prevalence of medical errors made by health care providers, the American Hospital Association (AHA) in Washington announced a campaign to help hospitals examine and further improve medication safety, the leading cause of hospital medical errors.
A report released last November by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, DC, estimated that up to 98,000 people lose their lives each year due to medical errors.
To help with the patient safety effort, the AHA will partner with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) of Huntingdon Valley, Pa. The ISMP will help AHA provide hospital leaders with an inventory of successful practices for reducing errors that can be adopted in every hospital. The practices are formulated from the work of experts and organizations that have been studying medication safety, including ISMP, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors, the National Coordinating Council on Medication Reporting and Prevention, the National Patient Safety Partnership, and many others.
The objectives of the campaign include:
• Sharing the successful practices list with every hospital and health system.
• Developing a "medication safety awareness test" for use by hospitals developed by ISMP that surveys hospitals’ progress on medication error prevention.
• Tracking implementation by the hospital and health system field of the practices for reducing and preventing errors.
• Working with national experts to develop a nonpunitive model medication error reporting process.
• Serving as a clearinghouse of information and resources for the hospital field on medication errors.
New Web site is available for hospital information
QuadraMed Corp. of Richmond, CA, has paired with Health Forum, LLC, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association (AHA) in Chicago, to provide a more comprehensive Web site for hospital information. This partnership gives QuadraMed’s American Hospital Directory Web site (www.AHD.com) select proprietary information from the AHA Annual Survey Database, enabling health care professionals to search and retrieve specific hospital information.
QuadraMed has developed its site using Medicare claims, cost report, and other public-use files obtained from the Health Care Financing Administration in Baltimore. The site enables subscribers to locate any acute care hospital in the United States that treats Medicare patients and track hospital characteristics and services, outpatient statistics, financial reports, inpatient utilization and costs. Since its inception, AHD.com has had more than 700,000 encounters and a length of stay exceeding eight minutes.
The AHA Annual Survey Database contains hospital-specific data items on more than 6,200 member hospitals and health care systems, including utilization, organizational structure, personnel, hospital facilities and services, and financial performance. Additionally, the database is the primary data source for several Health Forum — AHA products, including AHA Guide, Hospital Statistics, and Healthcare QuickDisc.
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