Quality Improvement

Beyond Center Stage at HIMSS

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By Susan Carr

The annual conference of the Health Information and Management Systems Society, HIMSS, is notorious for its size. This year’s event — March 1-4 in Atlanta — drew 27,855 health IT professionals, clinicians, and vendor representatives. The Exhibit Hall featured 934 companies and was packed most of the time.

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Quality Improvement

Distractions and Interruptions: Impact on Nursing

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Distractions and Interruptions: Impact on Nursing

Working at the point of care, nurses play a key role in the delivery of safe, quality healthcare. Acute care nurses have to make timely and relevant clinical decisions, yet work within environmental conditions that are conducive to error.  A recent study showed that nurses on average were interrupted 3 to 6 times every hour by people, pagers, telephone, etc (Potter et al., 2005). The potential impact of interruptions and distractions includes medical and medication errors, ineffective delivery of care, conflict and stress among health professionals, latent failures, and poor outcomes.

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Quality Improvement

Documentation: The Clinical Integration Specialist

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Documentation

The Clinical Integration Specialist: Improving Patient Care in the Energency Department
Paul L. Weygandt, MD, JD, MPH, MBA, CPE; Melinda Tully, CCDS, MSN; Andrew Dombro, MD

In an article posted to the Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare blog (Weygandt, 2009), we addressed a critical function for patient safety and quality: accurately communicating clinical information in real time by incorporating the clinical documentation specialist (CDS) as a key member of the clinical team.

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Patient Safety

Trends: Sentara Supports Its Commitment to High Quality Care and Patient Safety with Biomedical Device Integration

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Trends

Sentara Supports Its Commitment to High Quality Care and Patient Safety with Biomedical Device Integration

By Raphael L. Aquino, MS

Sentara is a national leader in patient safety and quality care innovation, operating in over 100 care sites in Virginia and North Carolina. Sentara is one of the most progressive and integrated healthcare organizations in the nation with a culture of safety focused on error and injury reduction through simplified rules of behavior for everyone working in the environment of care.

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