Pulse: Lucian Leape Institute Finds Medical Schools Fall Short in Teaching How to Provide Safe Care

Pulse

Lucian Leape Institute Finds Medical Schools Fall Short in Teaching How to Provide Safe Care

The Lucian Leape Institute at the National Patient Safety Foundation has released a report that finds that U.S. “medical schools are not doing an adequate job of facilitating student understanding of basic knowledge and the development of skills required for the provision of safe patient care.” The report comes approximately 10 years after the Institute of Medicine’s landmark 1999 report, To Err Is Human, which found that 98,000 Americans die unnecessarily from preventable medical errors.

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Health IT & Quality: Health IT’s Glue

Health IT & Quality

Health IT’s Glue

With the march toward deployment of healthcare IT in full swing, concern mounts about obtaining the full value from the investment. Spending $19 billion on health IT tools does not guarantee patient safety, enhanced quality, improved access to care, or reduced cost. In fact, many studies over the past years have shown just the opposite.

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Human Factors 101: Improve Reliability in Healthcare with Human Factors Engineering

Human Factors 101

Improve Reliability in Healthcare with Human Factors Engineering

Healthcare technology and training have advanced remarkably in the past 100 years, from the discovery of penicillin to the first heart transplant, but there is a downside to this progress. To quote Sir Cyril Chantler, former Dean of the Guy’s, King’s and St. Thomas’ Medical and Dental Schools in London, “Medicine used to be simple, ineffective, and relatively safe. Now it is complex, effective and potentially dangerous.”

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EMR Implementation: Building a Team of Informaticists

EMR Implementation 

Building a Team of Informaticists

In “Clinical Informatics and the CMIO” (PSQH 2010, Jan./Feb.), I discussed the importance of clinical informatics in institutions achieving their EMR implementation goals. I talked about why you can’t “just take the paper order set and make it appear on the screen” and how you should brace yourself for organizational change when you start doing electronic order entry.

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Editor’s Notebook: Scale

Editor’s Notebook

Scale

 

My email and Twitter accounts are full of news about Patient Safety Awareness Week (PSAW; March 7–13), which has been sponsored by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) since 2002. In an interview with Heather Comak of HealthLeaders Media, NPSF President Diane Pinakiewicz explains that the purpose of PSAW is “…to provide a week not just for heightened awareness about patient safety, but very specifically a focus on the role of the patient and consumer in the work.”

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Documentation: The Clinical Integration Specialist

Documentation

The Clinical Integration Specialist: Improving Patient Care in the Energency Department

In an article posted to the Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare blog (Weygandt, 2009), we addressed a critical function for patient safety and quality: accurately communicating clinical information in real time by incorporating the clinical documentation specialist (CDS) as a key member of the clinical team.

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AHRQ: Preventing Healthcare-Associated Infections

AHRQ
Initiating Promising Solutions and Expanding Proven Ones

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are on everyone’s hit list, as they should be, because no patient should get sicker from a preventable infection they pick up in a hospital or other healthcare facility.

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