Process Improvement

According to research by the Harvard School of Public Health, about 34 percent of patients say they or their families have been affected by a medical error. For people with chronic illnesses, the percentage rises to a frightening 50 percent. This may be, in part, because doctors aren't spending a lot of time listening to patients, interrupting after about 23 seconds, studies suggest. Realistically, it also comes from the inevitable ongoing process errors that occur during the routine …

Iowa state officials are looking further into the source of a recent break in to University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics IT system. The school apparently believes that it was a university employee who broke into the school's system.  In the wake of this incident, however, UIHC believes that it needs to the take stronger measures to prevent this from happening again. For that reason, UIHC has invited state auditor David Vaudt to increase means of access to the hospital's information …

Sometimes, consumers say, it's hard to get the medical establishment to take you seriously when you truly want a low-tech treatment before going for MRIs or other high-tech wonder-tests. A case in point came recently when a reporter for a major metro daily injured her foot after running too far for her fitness level. After struggling with terrible left forefoot pain, she attempted to diagnose herself, finding out that she could have a stress fracture, but continued to run four to six …

The results are in on the latest round of Medicare's 266-hospital, three-year pay-for-performance test. And it appears that, initially, P4P incentives are doing what they're supposed to do--improve adherence to evidence-based care. For example, under the new program, managed by nonprofit hospital alliance Premier, it appears that more heart attack patients are getting aspirin when they come into the ED. The winner in the competition to date was Hackensack University Medical Center, which …

A study conducted by Johns Hopkins among its own surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses has reached a fairly intuitive conclusion-that a brief pre-operation meeting between surgical team members can lower the number of wrong-person and wrong-site surgeries. In June 2006, Hopkins Hospital implemented a JCAHO policy requiring hospitals to have a pre-surgical conversation in the OR before each and every surgery. In their version, surgical team members hold a two-minute meeting in which all …

A Los Angeles hospital's decision to turn over instrument sterilization to insiders may have cost some infants their lives, state officials have ruled. In early December, White Memorial Medical Center was forced to close its busy neonatal ICU after an outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa made five babies sick and lead, most likely, to the deaths of two of those infants. A follow-up investigation by the California Department of Health Services has concluded that staffers charged with …

In the high-intensity atmosphere of the ER, nurses and physicians must make quick decisions often without patient's medical history. This can lead to mistakes, such as misdosing and miscalculation of the amount of drug needed. In Pasadena, however, several hospitals have brought pharmacists into the ER to cut down on these mistakes. Having a pharmacist on board can help hospitals cut down on errors and streamline the way drugs are distributed. "There is a lot of evidence in the literature …

In the 1970s, aviation accident investigators realized, by listening to black box recordings, than many airplane accidents were caused by a lack of communication in the cockpit. Likewise, a breakdown in communication between surgeon and staff often leads to devastating medical errors. And so, using techniques first employed by cockpit crews, some Chicago-area hospitals are having their staff undergo specialized training to help surgical teams improve communication and avoid errors. Such …

A new study by research with Johns Hopkins suggests that hospitals can cut catheter-related blood infections in ICUs meaningfully by using simple, common sense infection control practices. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins' Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care studied data fro 103 Michigan ICUs before, during and after those ICUs implemented new practices to lower the risk of infections. Their intent was to see whether the hospitals would find protocols which could help reduce …

Officials at Los Angeles-based White Memorial Medical Center plan to reopen its neonatal unit, having concluded an investigation into the source of a recent round of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections which may have contributed to the deaths of two infants. White had closed its neonatal intensive care unit on December 4th after five babies got sick; it then closed its pediatric intensive …