Not Every Summer Illness Is COVID-19: Decision Support Tools Can Play Key Role in Diagnosis
With the help of decision support tools, clinicians can differentiate between vector-borne diseases during a season where more people are at risk. A decision support system uses two or more items of patient data to generate case-specific advice. In practical terms, the output of such systems is used to arrive at a specific diagnosis.
How Remote Patient Monitoring Can Protect Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic
With healthcare workers and their loved ones at risk, provider organizations are looking for ways to leverage technology to keep their workers healthy while continuing to deliver essential healthcare services in their communities. Increasingly, they are looking in a familiar place—remote patient monitoring—but with a twist. Now, in some cases, those patients are also employees.
Understanding the New Joint Commission Requirements for Maternal Patient Safety
Many factors have contributed to the rise in maternal mortality, including the increase in complex comorbidities in expecting mothers such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cardiac disease. There has also been disagreement on the best approach to manage maternal patients, from creating a single oxytocin checklist to detailing more complex processes for managing preeclampsia.
Are Hospitals Ready for a Second Wave of COVID?
The following Q&A resulted from a conversation PSQH had with Stacy Pur, vice president of product development at Minneapolis-based VigiLanz, a company that provides real-time clinical surveillance systems for hospitals.
Positioning Telehealth for the Future: ‘Rear-View Mirror’ Lessons From COVID-19
During the pandemic, the spotlight has turned to telehealth and its power to deliver healthcare while maintaining social distancing. But as the World Health Organization warns of a second peak of coronavirus cases in the United States and a second wave of COVID-19 later this year, healthcare leaders must consider: How do we apply the rear-view mirror lessons from the first wave of the pandemic to our virtual response to consumers’ healthcare needs during the second wave?
Three Things Every Hospital Should Be Doing Now to Improve Patient Safety
A recent survey of 100 hospital leaders, physicians, pharmacists, and infection preventionists reveals some of the new safety-enhancing approaches that hospitals should consider. In the survey, conducted by healthcare consultancy Sage Growth Partners just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, respondents identified their top safety challenges, evaluated their safety performance, and identified their most successful safety improvement approaches.
Pandemic Speeds Up EHR Implementation
In this discussion, Doug Cusick, CEO of TransformativeMed, talks about why it has taken EHRs so long to roll out their technology virtually and why it took a pandemic to make EHRs—and health systems that use them—more accessible and easier to use.
Online Continuity
Now that patients are becoming more accustomed to seeking care this way, healthcare organizations are expecting telehealth will continue to grow. Frost & Sullivan researchers are projecting a sevenfold growth in telehealth usage by 2025, for a five-year compound annual growth rate of 38.2%.
Wait Times in Canadian Emergency Departments: An Incessant Dilemma
Individuals often erroneously equate a nation’s economic stability with the quality of its healthcare. However, this is not always true, and definitely not in the case of Canada. The average waiting time for patients in Canadian EDs ranges from three to four hours. More preposterously, this “average” accounts for only a minority of the population. When asked up front, most patients claimed that they’d had to wait for at least five hours before consulting a physician.
Surveillance Beyond the ICU
While much of the focus has been on the ICU and the many monitoring and therapeutic patient care devices used to maintain and manage patients’ airway, breathing, and circulation (ABC), there is also a growing need outside of these high-acuity settings for monitoring patients. What the general public—and even hospital leadership—might not be aware of is that outside of critical care, there is a patient safety concern that could be growing, in part, due to clinical staffing pressures associated with COVID-19.