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A hospital in Fargo, ND, focused on preventable falls in its cardiac telemetry unit and is seeing admirable results. After a year of effort, falls were reduced by 25% at the end of 2012, and then the hospital hit a 50% reduction barely a month later.
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Although healthcare organizations have been slower to adopt cloud-computing services than other industries,1 a recent study shows that 62% are using cloud services for some activities.2 However, 47% of respondents relying on the cloud are not confident that information is secure, and 23% are only somewhat confident.
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When hospitals hire more nurses with four-year degrees, patient deaths following common surgeries decrease, according to new research by the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia.
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A jury awarded $25 million to a 41-year-old man who experienced a severe heart attack only a few months after being given ibuprofen to treat his heart condition.
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Recent media coverage showed a dramatic 911 call between an emergency dispatcher and a nurse at a retirement home who refused to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on an elderly woman who was unresponsive.
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New provisions and clarifications in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) omnibus rule might have some hospitals scrambling to determine their compliance level, but it might not be a situation that requires outside help.
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The importance of encryption is emphasized with most of the recent major breaches added to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of breaches. Seven of the breaches involved laptops, while the other two involved paper records.
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Protecting the contents of a root cause analysis (RCA) requires much more than slapping a peer review label on the file and assuming that label means it is off limits to prying eyes. Peer review privilege might not protect your RCA at all, but there are other ways to limit the potential downside from someone reading about all your shortcomings.
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Sometimes an IRB director will notice that board members lack interest in evaluation processes. Any attempt to assess how each member is doing might be shuffled to the back burner of the schedules of very busy people.
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The University of California at Berkeleys Consent Builder application relies on the simplified language and template structure previously developed by the institutions IRB office.
