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As the lines blur between patient safety and worker safety, employee health professionals can expect much more scrutiny from regulators who traditionally focused on patient care.
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Failing to keep your exposure control plan up to date could lead to a citation from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
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The basic premise of worker safety is to provide layers of protection. If each layer is sufficiently flawed, the protection is compromised. That is the lesson of a recent Health Hazard Evaluation in an Arizona hospital, where 18 employees had a TB skin test conversion in 2011 and one employee developed active tuberculosis.
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The pilot testing version of the CMS survey includes the following elements on hospital employee health:
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In the last two issues, we discussed some of the topics related to health care reform that are of greatest interest to case management professionals. This month's Case Management Insider continues this discussion with a look at patient satisfaction, mortality measures, and the new efficiency of care measure.
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Nine hospitals in southern Texas have joined with the area's Agency on the Aging and formed the Rio Grande Valley Readmission Coalition to follow at-risk patients after they are discharged from the hospital in an effort to prevent readmissions.
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By improving processes within the hospital and collaborating with post-acute providers in the community, Charles Cole Memorial Hospital in Coudersport, PA, decreased its 30-day readmission rate for all patients by 15.9% in a one-year period.
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The initial notice of audit from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights (OCR) asks for a significant amount of documentation and information to be submitted within 10 days of the notice date, but that will not be the end of information for which you'll be asked, says Mac McMillan, chief executive officer of CynergisTek, an information technology security consulting company, who advised a Texas hospital included in the initial audits.
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A study by Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs investigators provides the first in-depth look at how healthcare providers react to medication alerts generated by electronic medical record systems. They found that clinicians often ignore alarms because they are uncertain what they mean.
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The risk of a medication error rises sharply when a hospital's pharmacy is closed, according to a report by Michael J. Gaunt, PharmD, senior patient safety analyst with the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority in Harrisburg. His recent study found that the incorrect drug was retrieved from an automated dispensing cabinet or night cabinet in 82.3% of wrong-drug events.
