Automated Care Tools for Population Health Management

By Karen Handmaker, MPP

With various forms of value-based reimbursement starting to take hold, healthcare providers have become increasingly interested in new care delivery models centered on population health management (PHM).

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Hand Hygiene
Moving Toward the Five Moments

By Tom Inglesby

Much has been written and discussed about the Five Moments for Hand Hygiene from the World Health Organization (WHO). Most healthcare workers agree that doing hand hygiene at those five events is important to improve patient care but not everyone agrees on the real-world implementation.

Interruptions Lead to Errors and Unfinished…Wait, What Was I Doing?

By The Institute for Safe Medication Practices

If you’re a health professional, it’s hard to get through a single hour of the day without being distracted or interrupted, even when performing critical tasks. For instance, nurses administering medications and pharmacists and technicians dispensing medications are distracted and interrupted as often as once every 2 minutes (Relihan et al., 2010; Silver, 2010)!

Electronic Physician Documentation

Not Just Another IT Project

By Joseph Catapano, MD, MMM, CHCQM

As hospitals throughout the country sprint towards Meaningful Use, computerized physician order entry (CPOE), electronic medication reconciliation, ICD-9-generated diagnosis tables, nursing documentation, and bedside barcoding seem to be riding a tsunami incentivized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

Editor’s Notebook

Nurses and Social Media

By Susan Carr

Working on an article for this issue (pg. 32), I conducted a brief survey of 12 nurse executives, which included a question about social media. Their responses confirmed my sense that most healthcare professionals are interested but tentative in their use of social media.

Medical Home

Information, Communication, and Teamwork for Care Collaboration

By Thomas McCarrick, MD

Hospitals now face penalties if too many discharged patients are readmitted within 30 days. This Medicare stipulation in the Affordable Care Act comes in response to expert analysis that indicates lack of discharge planning and poor follow-up care can lead to unnecessary admissions and higher healthcare costs.

Health IT & Quality

We Know What to Do

By Barry P. Chaiken, MD, FHIMSS

Almost eight years ago Richard Hillestad and his colleagues from the Rand Corporation predicted that electronic medical record systems (EMRs) would generate cumulative efficiency and safety savings of $142 to $371 billion during a 15-year period, an average of $81 billion annually (Hillestad et al., 2005). These savings were based upon assumptions of a low-end 1.5% productivity improvement from information technology (experience of the retail industry) to a high-end 4% productivity improvement (half of telecom industry experience).