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You can get hard numbers about things like infection rates and whether a heart attack patient gets aspirin within a specified time period in the emergency department. But can how a patient feels tell you anything important about quality? And can you put a number on something as fuzzy as a feeling?
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The regular collection and sharing of data with stakeholders to find and fix problems goes by many names the Virginia Mason Production System, Toyota Management System, Lean, Six Sigma, Quality Improvement Circles. All are based on the notion that to make things better, you need to look at data often and make changes quickly based on what you see. It is an idea that is gaining traction in healthcare as more peer reviewed studies showcase its potential for success.
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Electronic health records (EHRs) are supposed to make your life easier everything at hand, collected automatically. But thats not always the reality, and that fact is highlighted in a new report from the American Hospital Association (AHA) on how well hospitals are using EHRs to report on clinical quality measures.
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If you read it in a peer reviewed journal, it must be right right? And if there is an evidence-based practice, then the evidence must be stellar. Not so fast, says Lisa Spruce, DNP, RN, ACNS, ACNP, ANP, CNOR, director of evidence-based perioperative practice at the Association of periOPerative Registered Nurses (AORN) in Denver. Spruce is a big advocate of healthcare stakeholders becoming critical readers and understanding exactly what kind of data makes for good evidence. Doing so can make anyone better at determining what practices to mimic or adapt to local needs, and what can just be ignored.
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It is well known that healthcare organizations have access to a vast amount of data, and that a lot is unused and more is of little use. But what can be done about it? A June workshop at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) called Counting What Counts came to some conclusions and may mark the start of a new initiative to streamline data collection and make better use of what is collected.
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The Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET), an affiliate of the American Hospital Association (AHA), has created a series of checklists as part of the Partnership for Patients (PfP) campaign of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that, if implemented, might help reduce patient harm by 40% and unplanned hospital readmission rates by up to 20%.
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Hospitals are barely keeping up with the last round of changes in healthcare, but already there are people calling for another overhaul.
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Late in 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report outlining the potential benefits of health information technology, as well as the potential perils associated with it. "Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care" included specific recommendations, including that the government should find an independent organization to determine what use of technology could potentially harm patients and how to prevent those scenarios.
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The American Medical Association's Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement and The Joint Commission have come up with ways to reduce five commonly overused treatments use of antibiotics for viral infections like colds, over-transfusion of red blood cells, placing tubes in ears for middle ear infusion, early elective delivery, and elective percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
