The Joint Commission has issued a Sentinel Event Alert urging hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to take a new look at how to avoid mistakenly leaving items such as sponges, towels, and instruments in a patient’s body after surgery.

The constant beeping of alarms and an overabundance of information transmitted by medical devices such as ventilators, blood pressure monitors and ECG (electrocardiogram) machines is creating “alarm fatigue” that puts hospital patients at serious risk, according to a Sentinel Event Alert issued by The Joint Commission.

Providing higher Medicare payment rates to hospitals and clinicians in regions of the country characterized by good health outcomes and relatively lower spending and decreasing payment rates in regions with overall lesser quality and higher spending would not give providers the incentive to deliver care more efficiently, according to an Institute of Medicine committee studying the issue.

CRICO, the patient safety and medical professional liability company serving the Harvard medical community, has produced a video that puts forth a future vision of how Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) might be embedded into the physician workflow in a manner that would improve health care delivery.

Through February 26, The Joint Commission is seeking comments about a proposed National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) on management of alarms.

By Michael Wong

This is the question that I have been asking myself ever since Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced proposed quality measures it is considering for adoption through rulemaking for the Medicare program. One of the measures under consideration by CMS (proposed quality measure #3040) calls for “appropriate monitoring of patients receiving PCA [patient-controlled analgesia].”

The Joint Commission recently released a free monograph, “Improving Patient and Worker Safety: Opportunities for Synergy, Collaboration and Innovation,” to draw attention to the need to create a culture that focuses on both the safety of patients and the health care workers who care for them.

Insulin has consistently been declared a high-alert medication due to the risks associated with its prescribing and dosing. When a nutrition order for a patient is modified, the patient’s insulin regimen may inadvertently remain unreviewed or unchanged.

ECRI Institute®, an independent nonprofit that researches the best approaches to improving patient care, is pleased to announce The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, as the winner of its 7th Annual Health Devices Achievement Award.

New comprehensive guidelines for the pre-operative care of the nation’s elderly patients have been issued by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) and the American Geriatrics Society (AGS). The joint guidelines—published in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons—apply to every patient who is 65 years and older as defined by Medicare regulations.