Infection Control and the Built Environment: No Easy Answers
For more than 160 years, healthcare providers have understood that aspects of the built or physical environment of hospitals may deter healing or cause patients to develop new health problems, including infections, even as they seek help for existing illness and injuries.
Three Pillars of Clinical Alarm Safety
Management of medical device alarms has been a persistent challenge for decades (ECRI Institute, 1974). Histories of surveys, papers, and other initiatives to improve alarm safety have been compiled (Clark, 2005; ACCE Healthcare Technology Foundation, 2006; ECRI Institute, 2008), and yet the problem persists.
Cloud-Based Imaging and Report Exchange Coordinates Patient Care
Nuance PowerShareTM Network, the industry’s largest cloud-based network for securely connecting physicians, patients, government agencies, specialty medical societies, and others to share essential medical images and reports is now available from Nuance Communications, Inc.
Record Hand Hygiene Observations More Efficiently
Failure to perform proper hand hygiene is one of the leading preventable causes of healthcare-associated infections. iScrub is an iPhone/iPod Touch application from The Computational Epidemiology Group at the University of Iowa.
Awarepoint Humidity-Sensing Tag Now Available
The Awarepoint Humidity Tag monitors ambient room moisture in critical areas, eliminating manual logging, immediately notifying personnel of irregularities, and increasing compliance with issue resolution documentation.
New SHEA Epi Project Winner to Examine Best Practices in HAI Surveillance
The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) has announced Jason Lempp, MPH, CIC, as the winner of the third annual EPI Project Competition. Lempp was honored with the early investigator award for his project looking to determine if the Washington State Validation Protocol for central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) can be a scalable, sustainable model for tracking and ensuring quality national data on healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).
Longer Nurse Tenure on Hospital Units Leads to Higher Quality Care
When it comes to the cost and quality of hospital care, nurse tenure and teamwork matters. Patients get the best care when they are treated in units that are staffed by nurses who have extensive experience in their current job, according to a study from researchers at Columbia University School of Nursing and Columbia Business School.
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Zeroing In: UWB Technology Offers Greater Accuracy for Real-Time Location Services
The launch of the world’s first commercially available ultra wideband (UWB) wireless transceiver in November 2013 creates new opportunities for ‘location-based’ healthcare services, such as RTLS systems, patient monitoring, and critical equipment and personnel tracking, in U.S. hospitals.
American Society of Anesthesiologists Selects Premier, Inc. to Develop Learning Collaborative
The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) has chosen Premier, Inc., a leading health care improvement company, to develop a first-of-its-kind learning collaborative for the ASA’s Perioperative Surgical Home (PSH) model of care.