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The new 2004 National Patient Safety Goals released recently by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations continue all of the 2003 goals and add one to reduce health care-acquired infections.
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The next time you see footage of an airline crew working in the cockpit of an airliner, listen to how they interact. They speak clearly to ensure information is conveyed well. Each crew member watches the others work to spot errors. If they can do that while flying from Newark to San Diego, why cant your staff do the same while caring for a post-op surgical patient? They can, according to advocates of a strategy called crew resource management.
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An innovative program at The Baylor Medical Center in Grapevine, TX, has increased reporting of errors and near misses tenfold by encouraging staff to plant a flag when coming across a pothole in the road. The hospital uses the pothole analogy to encourage staff to do something when it sees a potential medical error.
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The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations recently called on hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to reduce the risk of serious and deadly fires in operating rooms with its set of 7 Absolutes to help you educate operating room staff.
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These are the required steps in the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations Universal Protocol for eliminating wrong-site, wrong-procedure, wrong-person surgery.
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The Rhode Island Department of Health is fining Rhode Island Hospital in Providence $300,000 for what the state says is a pattern of significant surgical errors.
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The ruling in Selective Insurance Company v Hudson East Pain Management, Docket No. A-0433-09T1, makes clear that health care providers can sometimes say no when insurers demand records.
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The Appellate Division of New Jersey has delivered a resounding victory to the provider community, protecting them from endless and harassing requests for confidential business information while "investigating" whether providers should receive payment for services.
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As good as metrics and dashboards can be for a risk management program, they can bring legal risks if not handled properly, cautions Ari Markenson, JD, MPH, an attorney with the law firm of Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff in White Plains, NY.
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The metrics tracked in your risk management program will vary according to your own needs and concerns, but this list of commonly applicable and useful metrics comes from Alan Rosenstein, MD, medical director of Physician Wellness Services, a consulting company based in Minneapolis:
