Process Improvement

Working with the Joint Commission, the World Health Organization has begun promoting a list of nine solutions designed to prevent care errors prevalent around the world. The solutions include methods for avoiding errors in administering look-alike, sound alike drugs; assuring correct patient identification; streamlining patient hand-over communications; hand hygiene; and needle reuse and injection safety. For example, the WHO/Joint Commission suggests several methods for verifying patient …

Following national trends, the Texas state legislature has passed a new measure which will make hospital infection rates public. The measure requires hospitals to report on rates of several specific infections, including bloodstream infections and surgical site infections from colon, hip and knee surgeries. Analysts predict that the legislation will spawn tighter methods to track in-hospital sources of infection, including the use of nasal swabs to test for methicillin-resistant …

Concerned that they aren't addressing the different ways various ethnic groups respond to medication, researchers are mounting major efforts to recruit varied racial and ethnic groups for clinical trials. Right now, the average clinical trial volunteer is a white male between 18 to 40 years old--and this is a problem. Researchers have increasingly found that race and ethnicity can be important factors in how a patient responds to medications, with some drugs functioning better in certain …

Hospitals that focus too tightly on cutting costs may create preventable problems such as medication errors and hospital-acquired infections, according to a new study by two Boston-area hospitals. To gather data, researchers studied four hospitals, including two urban teaching hospitals and two suburban hospitals, looking at 6,841 patient records over 12 months. The study found that when patient-to-nurse ratios at one of the four unnamed hospitals studied climbed 10 percent, the hospital …

With state officials and hospitals struggling to provide enough beds--and meet the need for post-discharge treatment--a growing number of Massachusetts children are having trouble getting needed mental health services. Mentally-ill children and adolescents face long ED waits, and when they are discharged, may not have access to outpatient programs. In February, for example, 156 children who were ready to leave inpatient psychiatric settings didn't have access to outpatient treatment. This …

While cancer is an equal-opportunity disease, it often hits the poor harder, according to a new study by California researchers. The researchers, who are affiliated with the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, surveyed more than 350 stomach and kidney cancer patients to get a sense of their personal and neighborhood risk factors. Researchers found that people who waited until their cancer was advanced typically lived in unsafe neighborhoods and had to travel at …

A new survey by the Commonwealth Fund has concluded that more than half of U.S. states have begun rewarding doctors for delivering quality care to Medicaid patients. What's more, almost 85 percent of Medicaid programs plan to have pay-for-performance programs in place within five years, many of which rely on improved use of health information technology, researchers said. The study suggests that states are moving much more quickly than Medicare administrators, analysts say. CMS is …

A group of ranking U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee members are asking HHS for a new study of the relationship between physician schedules and medical errors. The group, which has been conducting ongoing research into preventable medical errors, includes committee chairman John Dingell (D-MI), ranking member Joe Barton (R-TX), and Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI.) and Ed Whitfield (R-KY). The legislators are asking the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to fund an Institute of …

CMS has released the 74 performance measures it plans to begin using in its Medicare pay-for-performance program this July. Under the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, physicians who choose to report on quality measures can get bonuses of up to 1.5 percent of their earnings. The bonuses will apply to services provided between July 1st and December 31st of this year. The measures are drawn from discussions with varied physician trade groups and professional organizations such as the …

A new study suggests that hospital errors have increased appreciably from 2003 to 2005, with top-rated hospitals substantially better than worst-performing hospitals. The study, the fourth-annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals, found that the highest-rated facilities had 40 percent lower medical error rates than the worst performers. According to HealthGrades, there were 1.16 million patient safety problems within the Medicare population during the study period, …