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Healthcare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement Archives – July 1, 2004

July 1, 2004

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  • Reliability science: Ensure system success even when components fail

    Is your health care facility reliable? If it wasnt, would you know it and would you know how to turn things around? While most of us would be inclined to reply in the affirmative, recent studies indicate that when judged by the more rigorous quality standards being applied today, few facilities in the United States would pass muster.
  • System loop analysis eliminates phlebotomy lines

    Looking beyond the most obvious cause of long lines in phlebotomy has enabled staff at the VA Medical Center in Reno, NV, to eliminate those lines entirely. The key? System loop analysis.
  • Health plans offer rewards for quality improvement

    Health plans are increasingly offering modest incentive payments to reward physicians and hospitals for quality improvement, according to a study released by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) in Washington, DC.
  • Compliance with protocols may improve outcomes

    What has been called the first large-scale study to examine patient safety issues for isolated coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) showed that hospitals with the highest compliance with three recommended protocols had notably lower risk-adjusted mortality rates than those hospitals whose compliance ranked in the bottom 20%.
  • New clinical guidelines for palliative care published

    The National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care, a consortium of five palliative care organizations, has released a set of clinical practice guidelines to promote quality palliative care in the United States.
  • New report: Living wills doomed to failure

    While many palliative care quality professionals encourage the use of advance directives, a new report published in the bioethics journal Hastings Center Report by a University of Michigan internal medicine researcher and a professor of law and internal medicine claims that living wills dont and cant work.
  • CDC announces new goals, organizational redesign

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta has announced organizational changes for fiscal year 2005 intended to help the agency respond more nimbly to public health threats and emerging issues.
  • News Briefs

    Older heart failure patients whose care is coordinated by specially trained advanced practice nurses (APNs) during and after hospitalization experience a better quality of life and fewer hospital readmissions, according to a study in the May issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.