A recent report from the National Patient Safety Foundation’s (NPSF) Lucian Leape Institute, Safety Is Personal: Partnering with Patients and Families for the Safest Care, advocates for patients and families to be active partners in all aspects of their care, as well as in healthcare design and delivery and in policy development and research efforts.

Good patient care isn’t just diagnosis and prescriptions; it also involves patient compliance.

The Michigan Health & Hospital Association (MHA) Keystone Center is one of 26 organizations nationally selected as a Partnership for Patients (PfP) Hospital Engagement Network (HEN) to work with hospitals and healthcare providers to identify, share, and implement proven and reliable best-practices to reduce nine hospital-acquired conditions.

Although the federal government has recently devoted tremendous resources to promoting health information technology (health IT), debate about certification, standards, and best practices for safe use continues. In early April, three federal agencies contributed a new report to the growing literature about how to ensure the safety of health IT and more questions to an already lively discussion.

Falls are one of biggest safety concerns in critical care facilities. The varied population of a hospital unit at any time complicates the problem. Do you have the same protocols for adults, children, the elderly? Is the technical support that has been implemented adequate to handle all the differences?

A new set of guides and interactive tools to help healthcare providers use electronic health information technology products, such as electronic health records (EHRs), more effectively are now available at www.HealthIT.gov.

If we have known that hand hygiene was necessary for patient safety and wellbeing since the 1860s, why has it taken so long to instill the habit of washing before and after treating a patient? Perhaps, as Adam McMullin, vice president and general manager, Hill-Rom IT Solutions, says, “Hand hygiene has been an established practice that unfortunately just didn’t catch on for the first 50 years because a gentleman’s hands were always clean.” And, of course, all doctors are gentlemen. Or were, for the most part, in the 1800s, at least.

Automated alerts can provide an effective means of communicating essential information about drugs and patients to clinicians who prescribe, dispense, and administer medications. Alerts are typically communicated through warning messages that pop up on a screen and can cause either a soft or hard stop. A soft stop provides information to the clinician about a potential drug safety or efficacy problem and may offer alternative suggestions for the clinician to consider.

The topic of population health often comes up in conversations about healthcare quality as organizations aim to leverage information about their patient populations to improve the quality of care they provide. However, a focus on population health goes beyond just improving quality—at its core, population health management enhances the fundamental safety of patient care.

During the dot-com boom, many new companies based their business plans upon the volume of website visits. The revenue models assumed that by capturing the attention of users as measured by clicks on the company website, the organizations would generate wild profits through…something. Companies offered free products and services claiming that these Internet visits would deliver market share and revenue. In fact, many of these companies never thought through their business models nor understood their real costs.