When Face-to-Face Isn’t an Option
For many organizations, this has meant a shift to telehealth. This technology has been available for some time, of course, but was not nearly as widely used as it is today. How can providers make sure they have the know-how to help their patients maintain their care, live healthy lives, and get the medications and treatments they need, all while working with them remotely?
NIST Offers New Tool for Assessing Airflow Quality During COVID-19
The tool is designed for building managers and engineers to better identify strategies, such as adjusting ventilation rates or setting up portable air cleaners, that could help reduce exposure to the coronavirus in indoor spaces—like hospital rooms, waiting areas, or offices.
Improving Medication Adherence
A host of additional snares have arisen during the past year, but Rose points out that, pandemic or not, patients struggle with three main medication adherence challenges: The patient never takes a prescribed medication at all. This can occur for a number of reasons such as misunderstanding their chronic diagnosis or the need for taking a medication.
How Healthcare Telemarketers Can Effectively Communicate and Maintain Compliance During a Pandemic
Often, a healthcare telemarketer’s biggest challenge is ensuring effective communication in an environment where spam calls are prevalent. Robocallers are thriving on the large number of people working from home. Many impersonate the IRS and health insurance companies in an attempt to collect funds. This leaves patients feeling wary of healthcare telemarketers, and many often refrain from answering the phone entirely, especially when calls reflect no caller identification.
Achieving Zero Preventable Deaths: One Hospital’s Journey
At CHOC’s Quality Committee meeting in 2015, CHOC deliberately shifted its established goal from “reducing hospital-acquired conditions” to “achieving zero preventable deaths.” This goal became one of three quality domain factors that would determine annual leadership bonuses, thus further encouraging physicians to aggressively pursue it.
How Patient Safety Will Evolve in a Post-COVID-19 World
While this pandemic was unprecedented in our modern history of care, we must face the truth that we will confront other epidemics or health crises in our lifetimes, so we cannot ignore the lessons of the past year. In the future, having local stockpiles of PPE, monitors, and other medical supplies on demand will be essential to avoid repeating the struggle we faced during this pandemic. There is also a need for quickly scalable critical care solutions, as sourcing and configuring pieces of high-demand medical equipment when a surge hits is not efficient.
Advancing Safety and Care With Electronic Hand Hygiene Solutions
Unlike COVID-19, this issue has a relatively simple solution: Automated hand hygiene monitoring devices hardwire best practices in staff, increase compliance with hospital policies, and mitigate the risks associated with healthcare-associated infections.
Learning From Influenza Vaccine Errors to Prepare for COVID-19 Vaccination Campaigns
It is evident that many underlying causes of flu vaccine–related errors could just as easily lead to errors associated with the new COVID-19 vaccines and the hundreds of millions of doses that will be given. It will be crucial for any healthcare provider who plans to stock and/or administer COVID-19 vaccines to learn from these prior vaccine-related errors, anticipate that similar errors could happen with the COVID-19 vaccines, and take the necessary steps to prepare their facilities and healthcare teams to mitigate the risk of vaccine-related errors.
Medical Mayhem Room: Enhancing Situational Awareness of Patient Safety Risks in the Hospital Setting
To increase situational awareness of safety hazards in the hospital setting, quality improvement staff at Strong Memorial Hospital, the flagship hospital of a large academic medical center, implemented an experiential learning activity, the Medical Mayhem Room, during National Patient Safety Week in March 2019. This workplace-based activity was designed as a voluntary educational opportunity for nurses, resident and attending physicians, pharmacists, and other clinical support staff.
AAAHC Issues COVID-19 Risk Prevention Guidelines
Following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) has released recommendations to help organizations safely navigate the evolving stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an emphasis on steps to identify, isolate, and inform.