Process Improvement

While Minnesota providers continue to improve their performance on a set of key quality measures, substantial gaps remain between the best and worst performing groups, according to a set of quality ratings just released by a community non-profit group. MN Community Measurement, which is backed by the Minnesota Medical Association and the state's health plans, issues quality ratings on the majority of health systems in the state. Among the positives the non-profit found was that health …

So what can an airline pilot tell a hospital staff about how to reduce patient care errors? Plenty, it seems. A growing number of facilities, including Vanderbilt Medical Center, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and the University of Nebraska, are bringing in pilots to coach their teams. Health leaders there concluded that aviation safety approaches, which foster regimented communication and finely-tuned teamwork, can be transferred to a healthcare setting successfully. Provider execs …

When chronically ill patients are discharged from the emergency department, chances are they'll be back soon without further help. In response, health plans have increasingly been assigning "health coaches" to such patients, tasked with making sure patients are doing what they can to stay well. The health coaches, typically registered nurses, stay in regular touch with the patients, sometimes with home visits and sometimes over the phone, helping them schedule appointments, decipher …

Patients with family members in hospital intensive care units are generally not satisfied with the amount or the type of communication they get from ICU providers, according to a new study by researchers with Harvard Medical School. The researchers, who questioned 50 families with members in an ICU, found that communication had broken down in 40 percent of cases. Roughly two-thirds of the families said they weren't happy with the amount of information they got on the patient's status. …

Patients are more likely to die or experience complications in hospitals where there are lower levels of nurse staffing, according to a new study from the U.K.'s Royal College of Nursing. To learn more about the relationship between nurse staffing and patient outcomes, researchers examined 118,752 patient episodes of care in 30 hospital trusts in England. They also interviewed more than 4,000 nurses. The researchers concluded that mortality rates were 26 percent higher in wards with lower …

While emergency department use by the uninsured remains an ongoing concern, a new study has found that ED overuse by insured patients is also a problem, at least in California. Researchers with the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) found that patients with chronic illnesses, in particular, made medically unnecessary visits to emergency departments. These patients had a positive image of ED care, and felt they had nowhere else to go, given that their primary care doctor was closed or …

A new study suggests that while nursing home staffers know about virtually all medication errors that occur at their facility, only 5 percent of errors ever get reported to facility managers. To conduct the study, which was recently published in Nursing Forum, a University of Missouri-Columbia nursing researcher reviewed communication patterns, leadership styles and relationships between staff members at five nursing homes. The researcher found that nursing team members were …

A new study suggests that most pregnant women in the U.S. are still experiencing high-tech, medically-complex childbirth, with most opting for several interventions. The organizations behind the study, meanwhile, contend that many of these interventions are excessive and possibly dangerous if used on healthy women with uncomplicated pregnancies. One of the organizations backing the study, Lamaze International, is a high-profile proponent for "natural" childbirth. The other, Childbirth …

A new study suggests that when patients call their physicians after hours or on weekends, it's better not to ask them to decide whether their problem is an emergency or not. The study, which appears in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, suggests that asking patients to determine which concerns are urgent and which can wait until regular business hours can lead to serious complications. In fact, putting this responsibility on the patient's shoulders may be an …

A group of Connecticut healthcare stakeholders, including healthcare quality advocates, long-term care trade groups and the state's department of public health, have launched an initiative intended to speed up the rate of quality improvement in the state's nursing homes. The effort is part of the "Advancing Excellence in America's Nursing Homes" campaign, a national program which launched last month. The quality improvement campaign targets eight clinical improvement goals, including …