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When it's typical for patients to wait four hours or more to see an emergency physician, and your leave-without-being-seen (LWBS) rate is pushing 10%, you know it's time to rethink the whole process. And these were the grim realities facing the ED at Baylor Medical Center in Garland, TX, as recently as two years ago, explains Steve Arze, MD, the medical director of the ED.
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A recent follow-up study in the Archives of Surgery shows that improvement in patient safety has resulted from the implementation of Medical Team Training at a number of Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals.
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The news from the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare is not good: No matter how much healthcare providers and regulatory bodies stress the need to avoid wrong-site surgery, this sentinel event still occurs about 40 times a week.
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Electronic Health Records, or EHRs, can be valuable tools for quality managers as they strive to comply with The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals. That's a clear message communicated in a recent commentary in JAMA1; however, the authors take care to not only outline some best practices for EHR use, but to also review some of the challenges presented.
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To address the issues of health literacy, St. Vincent Charity Medical Center in Cleveland, OH, made a radical move.
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One important obstacle to clear, effective care transition communication is the format in which information is conveyed. If information about hospital patients is sent electronically, what should be included? Which fields are essential? And is it possible to include flexibility in an electronic form or data set?
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Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, FL, recently received the top "Quest for Quality" award, presented by the American Hospital Association and McKesson Corp., and the Memorial Health System's senior vice president thinks he knows why.
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Research institutions that make it a goal to improve ethical conduct among staff, researchers, and students engaged in research should focus on providing better ethics education, developing sound policies & procedures, and leading by example, an expert says.
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The moral struggles and ethical controversies encountered in physician practices all over America can be considered insurmountable at times. A recent study published in Psychiatric Times focused on a range of ethical dilemmas encountered in daily practice.
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A study, The Management of Myelomeningocele Study (MOMS), that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine found that if a baby suffering from spina bifida is operated on while still in the uterus, the most common and serious complication, myelomeningocele (MMC), can be greatly reduced.
