Q & A: What Makes A Quality EHR?
A 2016 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that for every hour physicians spend with patients, they spend two hours interfacing with their electronic health records (EHR). A different study found that 14% of physicians have experienced a potential medication error due to their EHR in the past month, and another 14% of physicians said that excessive EHR alerts have caused them to overlook something important.
CDS: An Essential Tool for Improving Patient Safety and Medical Care Readmissions
By promoting post-discharge medication adherence and more consistent follow-up appointments, CDS can help prevent deterioration that may contribute to avoidable readmissions.
Quest Diagnostics Breach Affects 34,000 Individuals
Quest Diagnostics, a Madison, New Jersey-based medical laboratory services company, announced a data breach affecting 34,000 individuals.
Can Predictive Analytics Push Patient Safety Into the 21st Century?
For industries across the country, data has become a key element of operational improvement, and the use of predictive analytics in particular has opened a new opportunity to better utilize a growing repository of data.
Understanding of Human Over-Reliance on Technology
The implementation of information technology in medication-use systems is widely accepted as a way to reduce adverse drug events by decreasing human error (Mahoney, Berrard-Collins, Coleman, Amaral, & Cotter, 2007). Technology examples include computerized order entry systems, clinical decision support systems, robotic dispensing, profiled automated dispensing cabinets (ADCs), smart infusion pumps, and barcode scanning of medications during compounding, dispensing, ADC restocking, and administration.
Build a Care Team
With healthcare complexity increasing daily, traditional models of delivering care fail to offer a framework capable of delivering high-quality care at a reasonable cost. The rapid expansion and evolution of medical knowledge makes it impossible for any single healthcare professional to assimilate and retain the up-to-date information necessary to properly treat patients.
Top 10 Health Technology Threats and Hazards
ECRI Institute engineers, scientists, clinicians, and other patient safety analysts rank the top technology-related threats that healthcare providers are likely to encounter in the coming year.
Cyberattack That Shut Down Internet Traffic Is a Wakeup Call to Hospitals
A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack crippled New Hampshire-based Dyn, one of the major domain name system hosts that monitors and reroutes internet traffic, October 21 and raised concerns about the healthcare industry’s ability to function in the face of a widespread outage.
How Automated Calls Can Significantly Improve Patient Follow-Up Initiatives
Four years ago, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) began and officially started penalizing hospitals for excessive 30-day readmission rates. Since then hospitals have begun implementing programs aimed at reducing readmissions, especially for high-risk patient populations.
Surveillance Monitoring: Current Challenges and Solutions
Failing to recognize early signs that a patient is deteriorating and respond with effective treatment—“failure to rescue”—has long been a challenge for hospitals, particularly among low-risk patients in low-acuity care delivery areas. Failure to rescue often affects postsurgical patients on opioids, though it is not limited to this narrow patient population. To reduce its occurrence, hospitals have primarily adopted rapid response teams.