Connecting Population Health to Patient Safety
The topic of population health often comes up in conversations about healthcare quality as organizations aim to leverage information about their patient populations to improve the quality of care they provide. However, a focus on population health goes beyond just improving quality—at its core, population health management enhances the fundamental safety of patient care.
Put Your Wi-Fi Network to Work for Safety and Security
Diane Hosson
Healthcare organizations have never had higher security needs. A safe environment is essential to quality patient care, and administrators must consider many different factors, including protection of patients and staff and the security of assets—often across sizeable facilities. Protecting high-risk groups, such as newborn babies and emergency department nurses is particularly critical and challenging for healthcare organizations. And the need for security extends all the way to medical equipment and assets that can be stolen or misplaced, increasing costs and affecting patient care and satisfaction.
ABQAURP News
July/August 2013 – ABQAURP News
Special Advertising Section – Incident Reporting: Analyze, Manage, Prevent
Every facility runs on policies and procedures. There are regulations and rules from outside to adhere with and internal policies that can expand on the requirements formulated by government and healthcare organizations. In the end, hospitals and other healthcare facilities are highly regulated and closely monitored.
Lessons From the Frontline: Compassionate Approaches to Preventing Patient Violence
Lessons From the Frontline: Compassionate Approaches to Preventing Patient Violence
Healthcare workers, especially nurses on the front line of care, are at risk of being injured by patients who become violent because of their emotionally unstable or clinically agitated condition.
Improving Reliability with Root Cause Analysis
Improving Reliability with Root Cause Analysis
Root cause analysis (RCA) has an image problem. Because various regulatory agencies require RCA to be used under specific circumstances, usually following an adverse event, the tool is primarily viewed as reactive. When these “sentinel events” occur, we pull out the microscope—RCA—and take a deeper look. Used in this way, RCA is often viewed as a “money-taker” because it appears only to consume people’s time and resources when they already feel overloaded. Rarely do we ask for a return on investment (ROI) associated with an RCA.
Usability Testing of a U-500 Insulin Syringe: A Human Factors Approach
Usability Testing of a U-500 Insulin Syringe: A Human Factors Approach
Currently, 8.3% of the population, 25.8 million people, has diabetes in the United States. Not all of those 25.8 million have been diagnosed as diabetics. Among patients with diabetes, 90% to 95% are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which often requires treatment with insulin (CDC, 2010).
Plan Ahead to Prevent Slips, Trips, and Falls
Plan Ahead to Prevent Slips, Trips, and Falls
Slips, trips, and falls on flat surfaces are the leading cause of workplace injury. And, in the healthcare industry, incident rates are 90% higher than in all other private industries combined, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national census of nonfatal injuries.
Nursing Home Tackles Readmissions with In-house Primary Care
Readmissions
Nursing Home Tackles Readmissions with In-house Primary Care
Across the country, healthcare providers are grappling with high rates of readmissions to hospitals within 30 days after discharge. Readmission to the hospital is stressful for patients and their families; costly; and, many times, avoidable.
Evolving to Health 3.0
Health IT & Quality
Evolving to Health 3.0
The dramatic shift to value-based reimbursement requires all providers to disrupt their care processes and workflows to ensure the delivery of high quality, safe care at a reasonable cost. For more than four decades these same providers thrived in an environment where providing more care easily generated higher prices and profits. In that former reimbursement model, a serious and dangerous moral hazard existed where the instinct to “do no harm” clashed with a similarly powerful driver to maximize income.