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James L. Reinertsen, MD, received a 2010 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality award for individual achievement from The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum
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At most hospitals, the vast majority of physician orders are still written by hand. That means a lot of hurried squiggles that no one can decipher, and time-wasting phone calls to clarify the order, not to mention the threat to patient safety
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Most hospitals have no documented information about communication events phone calls, pages, texts, voicemails between their nurses, physicians and other clinicians that occur hundreds of times each day.
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Risk managers focusing on the risk of suicide should remember that their own physicians also can be at high risk, says Matt Steinkamp, vice president of service delivery at Physician Wellness Services, a company based in Minneapolis that helps employers deal with impaired physicians.
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The phone on your desk can ring with news of a wide variety of events that will make your heart sink and yield trouble for the hospital for months to come, but few can rival being notified that a patient has committed suicide in your emergency department (ED).
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A 30-year-old pregnant woman presented to a hospital ER complaining of abdominal pain at a level of 10 out of 10. The woman was seen by an ER physician who diagnosed the woman as having a partial bowel obstruction. No further testing or procedures were immediately ordered, and the ER physician communicated to the surgeon that the situation was not serious.
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These are more results from the "Benchmark Study on Patient Data Security Practices," conducted by the Ponemon Institute in Traverse City, MI:
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You may be proud of your hospital's progress towards adopting electronic health records (EHR), but you could be overlooking the additional risks of data security breaches.
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The Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester is conducting a $12 million, multisite study funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health aimed at improving suicide prevention in hospital emergency department (ED) patients.
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Your patients probably expect that they'll be able to pay their hospital bills online, just as they do with all their other bills. "More and more, people are paying all their bills online," says Kathy Peterson, director of patient financial services at CVPH Medical Center in Plattsburgh, NY. "They don't have to write a check, don't have to get a stamp, and can wait till the final due date to pay. It is instantaneous."
