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If you're getting tired of bad news these days, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has some positive news. As it nears the end of its 5 Million Lives Campaign this month, it celebrates this year's successes, and according to IHI Vice President Joe McCannon, those have been plentiful.
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Press Ganey Associates Inc., the South Bend, IN-based patient satisfaction and quality firm, reports that "patient satisfaction leaped" after the launch of public reporting.
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Anticoagulants, or blood thinners, have taken the mainstream media by storm with salacious tales of medical errors and tragic stories of babies' deaths.
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Is it the end of an era for The Joint Commission? Following on the heels of Congress' move to require the organization to reapply for deeming authority for the first time, DNV Healthcare on Sept. 26 was granted deeming authority from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
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A story that ran in the Sept. 12 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer "Hospitals' mistakes are going unreported" might have shocked readers with its description of unreported errors in New Jersey and Pennsylvania despite the states' mandatory reporting requirements.
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In September, the American Hospital Association issued a quality advisory on implementing standardized colors for patient alert wristbands, citing a near miss when a nurse mistakenly placed a wrong-colored bracelet on a patient, confusing the color codes of the two hospitals for which she worked.
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While The Joint Commission is asking health care facilities to use computerized physician order entry and bar coding technology as an adjunct to arm themselves in managing high-risk medications including anticoagulants, a recent study highlights the errors implicit in this kind of information technology support.
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The National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) began in 1994 in response to concern over the quality of care, specifically operative mortality rates, in VA hospitals. Since then it has expanded to all hospital settings and come under the auspices of the American College of Surgeons (ACS).
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With the STAAR bill, which in part would establish an Office of Antimicrobial Resistance under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services, pending in Congress, what other regulations and requirements could be part of the future for hospital-acquired infection prevention?
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"It was pretty primitive, what we were doing," says Sarah Bland, RPh, senior clinical pharmacist, Center for Drug Policy at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, referring to the method of screening drug orders before she began to use Premier Inc.'s web-based tools.
