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The Joint Commission and the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) report that compliance with infection control standards is an ongoing problem.
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Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace continue to be a tricky problem for health care risk managers, who need to ensure that employees do not violate patient privacy even when off duty but also must avoid violating the personal rights of those employees. Failing to address the situation adequately could mean a HIPAA violation or damage to the provider's reputation, but using too heavy a hand could run afoul of labor laws.
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Patients who sue their surgeons for malpractice are more frequently receiving indemnity payments for increasingly larger amounts, according to a study of 3,300 cases across several states over a recent six-year period.
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The fake terror drill that left staff traumatized and the hospital facing a state investigation was a "very painful lesson," says Chief Operations Officer Teressa Conley, RN, MBA, MSN, EA, at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, NV.
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Involve physicians in the development and implementation of alert systems, rather than simply training them in the systems when you're ready to go live, says Linda Peitzman, MD, chief medical officer of Wolters Kluwer Health in Indianapolis.
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The proposed HITECH rules require covered entities to provide the recipient of any fundraising communication with a "clear and conspicuous" opportunity to opt out of receiving any further fundraising communications.
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A hospital's attempt to prepare for armed intruders took a bad turn when a drill simulating a man with a gun taking over a patient care unit was too real for some staff. Many did not know that it was a drill and were severely traumatized. Plus, the clinicians were kept from their critically ill patients until the drill was cancelled.
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Alert fatigue can lead to behaviors in health care that may seem fine until the day they cause a tragedy, says John Banja, PhD, assistant director for health sciences and clinical ethics at Emory University in Atlanta.
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Clinical alert fatigue remains a vexing problem for health care providers, and the risk to patient safety is high. When clinicians become so annoyed by alarms that they disable them, or so used to hearing them that they do not respond appropriately, patient's lives can be at stake.
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The American Hospital Association (AHA) says it is worried that, even with the recent changes, the standards in the meaningful use rule may be impossible for some hospitals to meet.
