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An infant is born with severe neurological defects following the mother's prolonged labor. Although the mother's labor is not progressing as would be expected, no one on the health care team seems concerned about the lack of progression until the unborn baby shows signs of fetal distress.
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Budget-conscious quality managers might want to take a good, hard look at the findings in the latest report from the Dartmouth Atlas Project, in Hanover, NH.
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At Blanchard Valley Regional Health Center in Findlay, OH, every employee receives bonuses linked to the organization's financial and quality performance.
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At Baltimore-based Harbor Hospital, quality professionals were challenged to get staff to wash their hands 100% of the time. "Hand hygiene is the one action that protects everyone we provide care to, and also protects our own safety," says Patricia Moorhouse-Getz, RN, MSN, the organization's clinical analyst.
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Project Dulce, a diabetes care management program housed at Whittier Institute for Diabetes in La Jolla, CA, has successfully addressed not only the difficult challenge of helping patients manage their diabetes, but also another issue of growing concern to quality managers: improving outcomes among minority populations.
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Quality professionals are making great gains using free resources to compare their performance against other hospitals, and publicly reported data can be a powerful tool to get "actionable" data for decision makers.
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New standards for the credentialing and privileging of practitioners call for a more objective and evidence-based process for monitoring performance.
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A high level of patient satisfaction and a wide range in the number of body parts upon which surgeons performed liposuction were two of the results that stood out in the recently released Liposuction 2004-2005 Report by the Institute for Quality Improvement (IQI), part of the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care.
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Fact sheets on the procedure are produced and distributed through the surgeon's office, brochures about your outpatient surgery program are in the packet the patient receives when surgery is scheduled, a nurse talks to the patient in a pre-admission telephone call, and a comprehensive instruction sheet is given to the patient upon discharge.
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In a final report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on specialty hospitals, the agency said it will fine these facilities $10,000 per day if they fail to report their financial structure to the federal government. It also will require specialty hospitals to disclose their financial relationships with physicians to patients and to treat all emergency patients regardless of their ability to pay.