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You have switched from razors to clippers to remove hair, you developed strict, scientifically based protocols for administration of prophylactic antibiotics, and your staff scrub their hands in the proper manner. Although all of these steps reduce the risk of infection in the operating room, have you checked your staff's nails?
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Compliance with The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) 3 in 2008 will require accredited organizations to pay close attention to their assessment and monitoring of patients who are on anticoagulation therapy.
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Do you and your staff have an extra 55 hours a year? That's the amount of time the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that you and your ambulatory surgery center (ASC) staff would spend complying with new and revised Conditions for Coverage (CfC) for ASCs.
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For the fist time since The Joint Commission began keeping records of sentinel events in 1996, wrong-site surgery has reached the No. 1 position over patient suicide in terms of cumulative data. There have been 552 reports of wrong-site surgery, yet it is viewed as an event that often is underreported.
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Before an ethics committee takes the time and effort to evaluate its performance, the members might want to step back and examine its standing within the institution.
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The great majority of U.S. health care dollars are spent supporting the chronically ill, yet the traditional focus of hospital care is on the "episode of illness," notes Bob Whipple, RNC, CCM, CCS, MHA, a Boston-based senior management consultant with ACS Healthcare Solutions.
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Expectant mothers receive a lot of information over the course of their pregnancy and are sometimes inundated with things to remember. Yet one important message that needs to be stressed is that some may experience postpartum mood disorders that can adversely affect their mental health.
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Chronically ill Medicare beneficiaries are learning to keep their disease under control through Care Improvement Plus's "Special Needs" Medicare Advantage plan that includes telephonic disease management and face-to-face meetings with a nurse case manager.
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Discharge planners/case managers are likely to encounter instances in which home care, hospice, and home medical equipment (HME) providers state that they cannot accept patients because they are "unsafe" at home. The use of this term may be confusing to discharge planners/case managers. What is it about patients' homes that make them "unsafe" for them to receive services there? Aren't all patients appropriate for home care?
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A multi-pronged approach to improving immunization rates for members, particularly infants and adolescents, has earned recognition for Independence Blue Cross from the Pennsylvania Immunization Coalition (PAIC).
