Kathleen Heuer is the deputy assistant secretary, Budget, Technology and Finance, at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). She discussed the Federal Health Architecture at the Digital Healthcare Conference sponsored by the Wisconsin Technology Network in June 2004.

Hospital-acquired infections represent a significant patient safety concern, causing increased injury, mortality, and healthcare costs. In 2002, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a national quality improvement project aimed at reducing the occurrence of postoperative surgical site infections (SSIs).

The crescendo of recommendations from regulatory, clinical, payer, and purchaser groups touting applications such as computerized physician order entry (CPOE) as solutions to unacceptable error rates is hard to ignore.

Clinicians naturally seek improvement and evaluate alternate ways to provide appropriate and optimal care for their patients. While many healthcare organizations have embraced TQM (total quality management), Six Sigma, PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), and other data-driven methodologies…

Welcome to the newest periodical in the dynamic world of patient safety: Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare (PSQH).Our goal is to provide “news, science, research,” and a forum for “opinion” to people from all quarters…

Fractures resulting from minimal trauma result in significant morbidity and mortality in the elderly. These fragility fractures are related to underlying osteoporosis.

Leaders of healthcare organizations often must rely on monthly or quarterly meetings to assess their organization’s readiness for the Joint Commission survey. As a result, key leaders typically cannot assess the current “health” of their organization…

Like many facilities, executives and risk managers at ValleyCare, a multi-facility healthcare system in the San Francisco Bay Area, knew that their paper-based process for managing incidents was inadequate.

When the Joint Commission coordinator for a 300-bed community hospital in the South heard about JCAHO’s new staffing effectiveness standards, she knew that compliance would be hard work, requiring data collection across the organization.

Between JCAHO’s Core Measures, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Seventh Scope of Work, state hospital association public reporting requirements, and NRMI (National Registry of Myocardial Information) and other performance improvement projects, healthcare organizations may face the need to collect the same data…