The Liberty QualityCare Client Satisfaction Survey is designed to provide an annual measurement of outcomes for a national, private, physician-owned corporation established in 1986. Liberty Healthcare Corporation provides healthcare management and staffing for acute care behavioral health, mental health, dual diagnosis with intellectual/developmental disabilities, correctional mental health, and primary care settings.

Fluoroscopy is a powerful tool that has been used over the past century in many medical disciplines. If asked, ”What is an X-ray?” many patients would say it is like a photograph—a picture of a body taken at a moment in time. Following this analogy, if a conventional X-ray is similar to a photograph, fluoroscopy is like a video.

When the Buick plant in Flint, Michigan, demonstrated in 1969 that automatic identification could be done with laser-based barcode readers even on a moving assembly line, many industries took notice. Unfortunately, healthcare wasn’t one of them.

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.

Standing up in a canoe is hard enough. Standing up in two canoes with one foot in each while traveling through Class 4 rapids is mind-boggling. Class 4 rapids are defined as “intense, powerful, but predictable rapids requiring precise boat handling in turbulent water.”

Since the initial discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928, a large number of antimicrobial agents have been harnessed for clinical use. While antimicrobial agents eradicate pathogens and control infections, it was recognized early on that bacteria exposed to antibiotics can evolve to survive them, raising concerns for antibiotic resistance.

North Shore Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Health System cut their medication errors related to patient identification by 86% through an innovative project designed to empower patients and standardize the way they are identified throughout the system.

Hospital construction affects everyone in the community. While a new facility may improve the care and services offered and enhance the workplace, construction projects on hospital campuses potentially add risk to an already complex, hazardous environment.

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.