Almost everyone who has been in healthcare for long enough can tell a story about a tired physician or worn-out nurse who has either made a mistake or come this close to it due to fatigue.
A typical hospital collects hundreds, if not thousands, of data points for reporting to state, federal, and accreditation agencies. It's so much information that trying to determine what is most important to share with a hospital board could become a tedious chore.
The most important consideration is to figure out what story you are trying to tell, says Lisa Snyder, MD MD, MPH, senior vice president and chief quality officer at Select Medical of Mechanicsburg, PA.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report in December that was critical of efforts made thus far to ensure medical errors associated with the use of health IT are minimized.
If you say it out loud, people will agree intuitively: You can learn more from your failures than from your successes. But that doesn't mean people want to trumpet what doesn't work.
As technology continues to evolve, so does its usage in the healthcare setting. Quality professionals are becoming more IT savvy as electronic health records become the new industry norm. Instead of flipping through paper charts and files, health information is searchable through electronic databases.
