Health IT & Quality: Making Meaningful Use “Meaningful”
Health IT & Quality
Making Meaningful Use “Meaningful”
A short three years ago, the Office of the
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology was funded
at a level of less than $150 million. Today, thanks to the Health
Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 — part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act —
the ONC received a budget of over $2 billion. In addition, no less than
an additional $19 billion is set aside to facilitate the adoption of
electronic medical records over the next decade.
AHRQ: Comparative Effectiveness Research
AHRQ
Comparative Effectiveness Research: Keeping the Patient at the Center
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.
Editor’s Notebook: Conferences and Silos
Editor’s Notebook
Conferences and Silos
While attending a number of conferences in October, I was struck by the
siloed nature of most of the educational sessions I attend. As a member
of the media, I go to a lot of conferences. Though I often work on
articles that identify “silos” — the provincial cultures of specialized
communities in healthcare — as counter-productive for safety, I had not
previously recognized the silos in conference-based education.
Perspective: Enforceable Regulations for Patient Safety
Perspective
Enforceable Regulations for Patient Safety
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, To Err Is Human (2000),
recommended a national goal of reducing medical errors by 50% within 5
years. To say that we haven’t met this goal would be an understatement.
In its latest National Healthcare Quality Report, the Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) asserts that, “measures of
patient safety … indicate not only a lack of improvement but also, in
fact, a decline of almost 1 percent in this area.”
IT Integration in the OR
IT Integration in the OR
Faced with increasing demands from the public and private purchasers
and payers of healthcare, clinician and administrative leaders in
hospital organizations are moving forward to address issues of
operational efficiency, clinician workflow, patient safety, and care
quality.
Suicide Prevention Outside the Psychiatry Department
Suicide Prevention Outside the Psychiatry Department: A Bundled Approach
With the advent of The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) and the Institute of Medicine’s report To Err Is Human
(IOM, 2000), patient safety has returned to the forefront in
healthcare. Meanwhile, across the nation, the network of inpatient
psychiatric facilities is shrinking. The number of persons struggling
with mental health conditions, however, is not, and their demands on
the acute healthcare system are growing.
Healthcare FMEA in the Veterans Health Administration
Healthcare FMEA in the Veterans Health Administration
Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a procedure that analyzes
potential failure modes within a given system. Each failure mode is
classified by severity to determine the effect of failures on the
system. FMEA is widely used in manufacturing, such as during various
phases of a product life cycle. It has become increasingly common to
find FMEA used in the service industries.
Unit Transformation Improves Safety for Mothers and Newborns
Unit Transformation Improves Safety for Mothers and Newborns
In “Delivering System Transformation: Respect, Communication, and Best
Practices” (Dougherty et al., 2007), we described what we found when we
looked closely into patient safety at the Maternity and Newborn Care
Center (MNCC) at our organization, Hunterdon Medical Center. We found
problems that included some identified as common root causes of
perinatal death and injury by The Joint Commission in its Sentinel
Event Alert Issue #30, “Preventing Infant Death and Injury During
Delivery”: poor communication, unavailable physician staff, hierarchy
and intimidation, and inadequate staff competence and fetal monitoring
training.
Risk Management & Patient Safety
Risk Management & Patient Safety
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.
Health IT & Quality: We Need Privacy Now
Health IT & Quality
We Need Privacy Now
Although a simple definition, it captures our greatest concern about
the digitization of our medical information. Who will access my medical
record? Will the information be used against me? Will it be released on
the Internet?