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Recent news reports of patients who lived for months with surgical items mistakenly left in them has spurred the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) to urge that such incidents be reported to the national system it has set up to record such errors.
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The National Quality Forum (NQF) announced recently that it had approved 26 safe practices that should be universally utilized in health care to reduce the risk of adverse events. Four additional practices will continue to be evaluated and may be approved in the coming months.
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Translating medical information for patients who dont speak English has always been a difficult issue for health care providers, but evidence is mounting to suggest that health care providers risk major lawsuits from medical errors traced to inadequate translation.
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The emergency department generates a large percentage of outpatient revenues and also has complex coding and billing guidelines for facility fees. Numerous ancillary services frequently are provided during the ED visit.
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While few hospitals have yet extended their case management system into the emergency department, some have discovered the value of ED
case managers in ensuring accurate documentation and coding.
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Using the balanced scorecard concept, the multidisciplinary Emergency Services Performance Improvement Team at WakeMed health system in Raleigh, NC, was able to standardize the way data were collected and presented.
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Unsatisfied with the quality and the cost of the template charting system they were using, emergency department personnel at the Medical College of Georgia and Childrens Medical Center in Augusta went their own way, creating a limited number of broad-based templates.
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Challenged by increasingly stringent documentation requirements, many emergency departments are turning to template charting systems as a way to cut documentation time, eliminate transcript costs, and ensure accurate coding.
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