As the demand for clinical documentation grows, physicians find themselves torn between attending to patients and recordkeeping, often working on computer systems that are distracting for physicians and patients alike. 

As independent companies built railroad lines in the 19th century, each company chose a different gauge—the distance between the inner rails—for their track. As the railway industry first grew out of the need to transport mined materials…

The change is underway. The healthcare ecosystem is officially shifting from volume- to outcome-based reimbursement. With so much at stake, risk-bearing provider organizations are well aware of the importance of “getting it right” and “doing it well.” 

Ten years, 60 to-press deadlines, more than 240 feature articles, at least that many columns—thinking about how much material we’ve published in 10 years gives me pause, and that’s only in print.

Lionheart Publishing launched the first issue of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare (PSQH) in August 2004. Earlier that year, Pennsylvania implemented the first statewide mandatory reporting system (“Pennsylvania Is First State,” 2004); President George Bush pledged to make electronic health records available to most patients by 2014 (White House, n.d.), and Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook (Facebook, 2014).

An Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee has studied the system for governance and public funding of graduate medical education (GME) and finds that it suffers from a “striking absence of transparency and accountability” (IOM, 2014, p. S-13) and provides a physician workforce that is out of sync with the nation’s current needs. 

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is an illness first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. It is caused by a coronavirus, MERS-CoV. Most people who have been confirmed to have MERS-CoV infection developed severe acute respiratory illness.

How much noise is heard over the course of the day in the average hospital unit? One study found alarm rates up to 700 per bed per day (ECRI Institute, 2013a; Graham & Cvach, 2010). When alarms sound so frequently, they simply cannot be managed adequately. Ineffective alarms lead to alarm fatigue among staff members…

This second article in a four-part series on patient- and family-centered-care (PFCC) focuses on family presence during resuscitations and invasive procedures. Continuing the story from the first article in the series (Homme et al., 2014), Max’s mother relates her experience as she prepared to be separated from her son…

A little more than a decade ago the introduction of “smart” pumps with dose error-reduction systems (DERS) dramatically improved the safety of intravenous (IV) infusion therapy. Wireless connectivity enhanced system management and laid the foundation for integrating smart pumps with other systems and devices.