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Electronic health records (EHRs) are supposed to make your life easier everything at hand, collected automatically. But thats not always the reality, and that fact is highlighted in a new report from the American Hospital Association (AHA) on how well hospitals are using EHRs to report on clinical quality measures.
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The regular collection and sharing of data with stakeholders to find and fix problems goes by many names the Virginia Mason Production System, Toyota Management System, Lean, Six Sigma, Quality Improvement Circles. All are based on the notion that to make things better, you need to look at data often and make changes quickly based on what you see. It is an idea that is gaining traction in healthcare as more peer reviewed studies showcase its potential for success.
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You can get hard numbers about things like infection rates and whether a heart attack patient gets aspirin within a specified time period in the emergency department. But can how a patient feels tell you anything important about quality? And can you put a number on something as fuzzy as a feeling?
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AHRQ awards measures clearinghouse contract.
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Just about everyone agrees that alarm management is a big issue in healthcare.
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If you have tried looking for specific information on the National Quality Forum (NQF) website and been flummoxed by too many or too few query responses, you might want to check out the new Field Guide to NQF Resources.
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Checklists are often touted as the potential cure for the ill that is patient harm. If it works for the aerospace industry, why can't it work for healthcare? Indeed, there is ample evidence that some checklists can make a big difference in patient safety.
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There has been an intense focus on reducing unplanned readmissions in hospitals. Payers are refusing to pay for them, and increasingly the public believes that they are a determinant of the level of quality of care a particular facility provides to patients. But a study in the June issue of Health Affairs1 indicates that looking at this single data point doesn't tell the whole quality story.
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Talk about surgical safety and people will automatically think of issues like objects left in a patient after closing or operating on the wrong site. Surgical-site infections are a hot topic. But surgical scheduling? Put that in the PubMed search engine and not much comes up. Add the term "patient safety" and you get a single, lonely article.
