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The report card that begins below is an example of a method for aggregating and reporting all the measures that we have reviewed in the last two issues.
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When Stony Brook University Medical Center presented an educational program to its urology staff about the importance of using the correct terms in documentation, the physicians pointed out that in medical school, they learned to write "urosepsis" on the chart for patients who had developed sepsis from a severe urinary tract infection, according to Catherine Morris, RN, MS, CCM, CMAC, executive director of care management and clinical documentation improvement administrator at the 591-bed regional hospital in Stony Brook, NY.
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After working with a consultant to determine how to improve clinical documentation, the care coordination department at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC, revamped its clinical documentation program, adding more staff and shifting the team from unit-based to service-based.
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To improve patient safety by encouraging healthcare providers to speak up about their concerns, risk managers should focus on the influences that have the strongest effect on behavior, suggest the authors of The Silent Treatment, conducted by VitalSmarts, a corporate training company in Provo, UT, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, and the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses.
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When a surgeon at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, NY, performed a procedure on the wrong side of a patient's back in 2008, the sentinel event stunned the hospital's administration. But it wasn't long before hospital leaders were formulating a plan to make sure it never happened again.
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In response to a task force's recommendations following a wrong-site surgical error, Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, NY, implemented these changes:
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CEO Rob Mackenzie, MD, used his leadership position to help drive the culture change at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, NY.
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Hundreds of obstetrical nurses, midwives, residents, and doctors completing an intensive continuing education program focused on risk management are helping their hospitals lower professional liability costs through an obstetrics-intensive patient safety program.
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A mother took her 4-year-old daughter to the emergency department with symptoms of gagging and watery diarrhea. The physician caring for the child determined that the child was not suffering from dehydration and provided a prescription for the child's nausea. The child's symptoms worsened. After the parent was told by the hospital to allow the medicine additional time to work, the child died. A verdict was entered against the hospital in the amount of $200,000.
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Saints Medical Center in Lowell, MA, announced recently that it will pay $579,000 to settle alleged Medicare billing violations, the first settlement since the publication of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) voluntary self-referral disclosure protocol (SRDP).
