By Susan Carr

Working with two patient advocates, the Reliability Center has released a webcast that analyzes the sudden, unexpected death in January 2001 of 11-year-old Justin Micalizzi immediately following surgery for an infected ankle. For 10 years, the Micalizzi family—especially his mother, Dale, now a well known patient safety advocate—sought unsuccessfully and without the cooperation of the hospital to discover what caused Justin’s death or at least to elicit a clear and honest pledge that the hospital would commit sincerely to understanding what had happened. READ MORE...

iSirona, a provider of simplified solutions for medical device integration, announced on May 8 that UC Irvine Medical Center will be implementing iSirona's device connectivity solution throughout its campus.

Established by the academic teaching institutions and Harvard Medical School (HMS), the HMS Fellowship in Patient Safety and Quality is proud to present its first four recipients representing the Class of 2012. READ MORE...

The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) announced on May 9 that it has awarded a total of $200,000 in grants for two innovative patient safety research projects. The grants are awarded through the NPSF Research Grants Program, which promotes studies leading to the prevention of human errors, system errors, patient injuries, and their consequences. READ MORE...

A new patient safety and medical education initiative, standardizing and improving how patient care is "handed off" during hospital shift changes, can reduce medical errors by as much as 40 percent, report physicians at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Boston. READ MORE...

Patients having psychiatric emergencies wait 11.5 hours in the emergency department, and those who are older, uninsured or intoxicated wait even longer, according to a study published online recently in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Patient and Practice-Related Determinants of Emergency Department Length of Stay for Patients with Psychiatric Illness"). READ MORE...

Communication and collaboration are critical elements of success for effective work environments, particularly in health care. When these elements break down, the result can be a cascade of negative events. Yet when collaboration is strong, it reaps positive benefits on the workplace culture and patient outcomes. READ MORE...

By Tim Vanderveen, PharmD, MS

In April, Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare published an article summarizing a recent webinar presented through ourCenter for Safety and Clinical Excellence. The article is titled “Smart Pump Workarounds – What’s the Legal Risk?”, and it focuses on personal accountability on the part of caregivers in safely operating Smart IV pumps.

Caregiver accountability has been a hot topic in recent months. As it relates to IV medication safety, it’s a critical issue and worth paying attention to. It’s been shown that clinicians often implement process workarounds, including not utilizing the drug library, overriding soft dose and concentration alerts, reprogramming infusions as rate in ml/hr following hard limits, and occasionally removing IV tubing from pumps and delivering medication boluses by gravity to avoid a high dose alert.

Ekahau Inc. announced the May 8 launch of its newest Wi-Fi staff badge. READ MORE...

Phytel, the leader in automated physician-led population health improvement, recently announced that Northeast Georgia Physicians Group has selected Phytel and its Atmosphere platform to help transform all of its 30-plus ambulatory-care clinics into patient-centered medical homes by the end of the year. READ MORE...

By Susan Carr

In PSQH, we usually focus on preventing patient harm that results from errors—mediation overdoses, wrong-site surgery, MRI accidents, failure to rescue, etc.—that trace back to systemic problems in healthcare institutions. Those problems include poor communication, environments full of distraction and stress, inadequate training, power hierarchies, to name a few.

The Sky Factory, a fine art and technology company, will exhibit at ESTRO 31 in Barcelona, May 9 - 13. 

Intelligent InSites, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise real-time location systems (RTLS) software helping hospitals improve operation performance and patient satisfaction while supporting multiple RFID and RTLS technologies, has annouced that its InSites Connect RTLS mobility solution is now available in Apple's App Store.

Sotera Wireless, Inc. announced that it has received 510(k) clearance from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the ViSi Mobile™ System, a new continuous vital signs monitoring system for use in hospitals. READ MORE...

Smiths Medical, a leading global medical device manufacturer, announced on April 23 that its ViaValve Safety I.V. Catheter has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and can be marketed in the United States. READ MORE...

PROACTOnDemand, the new RCA SaaS Web Application for performing and delivering Root Cause Analysis developed by Reliability Center, Inc., of Hopewell, Virginia was awarded the Product of the Year Gold Award by Plant Engineering magazine readers in the Maintenance Software category.

CareFusion and Cerner recently announced the live limited commercial release of a new infusion pump connectivity solution at Oklahoma Heart Hospital, one of the nation's first all-digital hospitals exclusively focused on heart care.

Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., F.C.C.M., a world-renowned patient safety champion who’s devoted his career to making hospitals and health care safer for patients by reducing medical errors and avoidable harm, is the recipient of two national honors.

The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) offers International ACS NSQIP Scholarships for two surgeons from countries other than the United States or Canada who demonstrate strong interests in surgical quality improvement.

The National Quality Forum (NQF) Board of Directors has endorsed two measures that address all-cause unplanned readmissions in hospitals – an area of healthcare targeted for improvement given national imperatives to make healthcare safer, more affordable, and keep people healthy.

In the year since its launch, Doximity has grown to over 50,000 active physicians and is now used by 9% of all doctors in the United States. In that time, Doximity has also facilitated more than one million connections between doctors— affecting the care of tens of millions of American patients. In reaching this milestone, Doximity has established itself as the largest and fastest-growing professional network for physicians online.

Doximity uniquely provides a HIPAA-compliant platform where physicians use their real name and verified credentials to establish and share their professional expertise.

READ MORE...