Many states and communities are forming health information exchanges (HIE) to promote greater care coordination and collaboration across healthcare settings. Most of these repositories capture traditional clinical data, pulling from hospital and physician practice records, but behavioral health data is conspicuously absent.

A new report from the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) examines root cause analysis (RCA), a process that nearly all health systems use in response to adverse events. Although RCA is commonly used—and in some cases mandated by The Joint Commission—many organizations are unhappy with the process and dissatisfied with the results.

RTI International has released the Health IT Safety Center Roadmap, which it produced for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The report (available at www.healthitsafety.org) lays out a plan for creating a sustainable center dedicated to improving the safety of healthcare through the use of information technology (IT) while also addressing safety problems introduced by the use of IT.

New funding opportunities from AHRQ are dedicated to diagnostic safety.

I was recently asked by a care manager to “please educate the docs” on the difference between inpatient and observation. How many times in the daily work routine of a physician advisor have we heard that request or something similar?

Healthy People 20201 includes “Create social and physical environments that promote good health for all” as one of the four overarching goals for the decade. The program’s agenda includes social determinants of health as a new topic area.