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.
How Patient Matching Can Help Eliminate COVID-19 Disparities in Care
During the first months of the pandemic, these breakdowns in data capture prevented officials from directing lifesaving resources to populations most at need during a public health crisis, such as people who lack stable housing, certain racial and ethnic groups, and those who live in high-risk ZIP codes.
Patient Apps Help Families Communicate With Caregivers
The pandemic has made communication between care teams and families particularly challenging, leading hospitals to seek new ways to reach out to loved ones who often can’t be by a patient’s side—or even in the waiting room—during a surgery. Having a means to communicate securely beyond the hospital walls, whether the receiving family member is waiting in their car outside the facility or at home across the country, is essential for reducing anxiety, increasing understanding, and creating a better healthcare experience.
Q&A: The Need for Better Training for IV Insertions
A collaboration announced in October 2020 between the Association for Vascular Access (AVA) and B. Braun Medical Inc. seeks to improve clinician training on the placement of PIVCs. Together, the organizations will develop and provide a series of online courses free of charge to schools of medicine, nursing, respiratory therapy, and other allied health professionals—the first of which is being currently piloted at several leading nursing schools.