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Late in 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report outlining the potential benefits of health information technology, as well as the potential perils associated with it. "Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care" included specific recommendations, including that the government should find an independent organization to determine what use of technology could potentially harm patients and how to prevent those scenarios.
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The American Medical Association's Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement and The Joint Commission have come up with ways to reduce five commonly overused treatments use of antibiotics for viral infections like colds, over-transfusion of red blood cells, placing tubes in ears for middle ear infusion, early elective delivery, and elective percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
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No one expects everyone to read through the 1,000-plus pages of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) proposals for 2014. But there are parts of the proposal that impact quality departments, and they demand some study.
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Wrong-site surgery: 20 times a week. Wrong surgery on a patient: 20 times a week. Object left in a patient: nearly 40 times a week. Surgical "never events": more than 4,000 times a year. Those statistics were reported in a study published in April in the journal Surgery.1 With such statistics, there will never be a single solution that makes surgery safer.
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Every parent of a toddler knows that a time-out isn't so much a punishment for the child as a moment to breathe for the parent. It's this moment of calm that is the basis for the use of time-outs in a variety of fields, including surgical medicine. It's a chance to stop and make sure the path you are on is correct. And it's a tool that anyone can use, says Vicki Hess, RN, MS, principle at Catalyst Consulting, based in Baltimore, MD.
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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.
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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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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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As a safety net hospital, Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas always has served the uninsured, and patient access employees have helped countless individuals to qualify for Medicaid, disability, grants, crime victims, or the hospitals charity program. Recently, however, they have worked with many patients who have never sought any type of assistance before.
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Too much time spent waiting and too many phone calls were the two things that patients complained about most often regarding registration at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver.
