On July 18, the American Hospital Association (AHA) announced that the Michigan Health & Hospital Association (MHA) and the South Carolina Hospital Association (SCHA) will receive the Dick Davidson Quality Milestone Award for Allied Association Leadership for their work to improve health care quality.

The Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety (PPAHS), an advocacy group devoted to improving patient health and safety, has announced the release of a concise checklist that reminds caregivers of the essential steps needed to be taken to initiate Patient-Controlled Analgesia (PCA) with a patient and to continue to assess that patient’s use of PCA.

Clarity PSO, a Division of Clarity Group, Inc., has released a white paper that describes best practices in radiology peer review, introduces philosophies of a “just culture,” and demonstrates how such an approach can lead to improved physician performance and quality care.

An estimated 80 percent of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers when patients are transferred or handed-off. In addition to patient harm, defective hand-offs can lead to delays in treatment, inappropriate treatment, and increased length of stay in the hospital.

In late June, GE Healthcare unveiled the GE Blueprint for low dose, a comprehensive program that helps healthcare providers integrate CT technologies, education and process improvements, and data analysis to reduce patient radiation dose from Computed Tomography (CT) by up to 50 percent.

Telehealth provides new options for higher-quality, lower-cost monitoring, but interoperability issues have hampered its adoption. To minimize those challenges and add flexibility, Independa has announced that it will incorporate the 2net Platform from Qualcomm Life Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, into its Artemis suite of telecare monitoring solutions for the elderly and their caregivers.

2012 is the year for many innovations in radiology, but who would have thought that a Facebook game could be one of the most popular? San Diego-based Ziltron has recently released a Facebook web-game called “X-Ray Ninja,” which is a quick-fire game initially tackling the area of emergency radiology.

Led by the Massachusetts Medical Society, six health care organizations announced on April 18, 2012, the start of a major initiative to improve the medical liability system in the Commonwealth.

The new alliance has launched its effort with the release of a Roadmap to Reform, an alternative approach to medical liability intended to improve patient safety, increase transparency, reduce litigation, and cut costs to the health care system, and with the announcement that seven hospitals will participate in a pilot program this year to implement the reforms.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) offers a free toolkit to help hospitals understand and make effective use of the agency’s Quality Indicators (QIs) and Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs). In addition to its focus on these indicators, the toolkit is a general guide to using improvement methods.