Making Sense of a Safety Reporting System’s Data with BI Software

By Andrea L. Long, PharmD; John Schroder, RN; Julie M. Whitehurst, PharmD, MPH; Monica M. Horvath, PhD; Dave Leonard, BS; Heidi Cozart, RPh; Jeffrey Ferranti, MD, MS

Safety incident detection and analysis are key components of a framework for patient safety improvement—both allow for understanding the nature of adverse events and can inform healthcare process enhancements to prevent error recurrence (Pronovost, et al., 2009). As the culture of error reporting has grown, the accumulation of data has outpaced our ability to effectively and efficiently analyze it for safety and quality interventions. (Johnson, 2003; Boxwala, et al., 2004).

Forging a New Era of Accountable Care

By Todd Cozzens

The country’s current healthcare system is fiscally unsustainable. The United States spends more of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare than any other country, yet ranks only 37 in performance, according to the World Health Organization. Furthermore, healthcare spending is expected to increase from $2.6 trillion to $4.6 trillion by the end of the decade. As a result, new approaches to healthcare with the goal to achieve the Triple Aim—enhance quality, reduce cost, and improve outcomes—have started to emerge.

Safety in Numbers? Try Connectivity

How medical device integration increases patient safety.

By Dave Dyell

Oh, to be a CIO at a U.S. hospital today. No doubt your job is challenging. But your skill set is in very high demand. Plus, you have an opportunity to flex your informatics muscles and escort your hospital towards meaningful use. But first you need board-approved funding for medical device integration, or device connectivity.

Perioperative Technology Improves SCIP Measurements in a Community Hospital

By Kermit Randa, MHA, FACHE, CPHIMS

One of the most highly regarded quality initiatives in the hospital operating room (OR) sphere is the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP), an ongoing program whose work was initiated in 2003 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is coordinated through a steering committee of 10 national organizations committed to improving surgical care quality and patient safety.

Wander-Risk Patients: Best Practices for Hospitals and Assisted-Living Facilities

By Susan Carr

With this issue, Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare (PSQH) reaches its fifth anniversary, which prompts me to take a moment and think about how much the world has changed and stayed the same in the past five years. When we published the first issue, in July 2004, the patient safety community was discussing how much progress—if any—had been made since the IOM published To Err Is Human five years earlier, and now we are assessing progress made over the past 10 years.

Emergency Ultrasound at the Bedside: Not Just FAST

A Cost-Effective Technology to Reduce Medical Errors and Improve Safety

By David Bahner, MD, RDMS, FACEP, FAAEM, FAIUM

For critically injured trauma patients, “there is a golden hour between life and death,” observed R. Adams Cowley, MD, who pioneered the United States’ first statewide Emergency Medicine Service, in Maryland, in 1973. Also the founder of the nation’s first shock trauma center, Cowley is widely credited with being the first physician to recognize the supreme importance of combining skill, speed, and use of state-of-the-art medical technology to diagnose and initiate treatment of trauma patients during the first 60 minutes after an injury. His “golden hour” paradigm has revolutionized emergency care worldwide by highlighting the ideal strategy to optimize trauma patients’ survival (University of Maryland).