Radiology: The Case for Standards-Based Performance Assessment
Radiology
The Case for Standards-Based Performance Assessment
Diagnostic radiology is a vital component of the healthcare system and is utilized in the diagnosis and management of nearly every hospital patient. Radiology services cost $175 billion annually in the United States, representing 7.5% of total healthcare expenditures. Given the size of the annual spend, there can be little argument that aggressive utilization management is warranted to control front-end costs; however, evaluating the quality of service is equally important since radiology errors can lead to significant downstream costs.
Technology: Choosing the Right Vendor for Incident Reporting
Selecting the right vendor is like dating: once you find “the one,” you want to make it a long-term partnership. And much like in dating, if you choose a vendor whose vision and behavior does not align with yours, you both can feel stuck in an unhappy relationship.
Health IT & Quality: Super-organism Focused Care
Health IT & Quality
Super-organism Focused Care
About 10 trillion cells make up the human body. The joining of eggs and sperm at the time of fertilization brings together 23,000 genes. In a healthy gut alone, more than 100 trillion bacteria thrive. Scientists estimate that the microbiome—the term used to describe all the bacteria and other organisms that live on and within us—collectively represent more than three million genes.
Nurse-to-Physician Communications: Connecting for Safety
Nurse-to-Physician Communications: Connecting for Safety
Ms. Jones, a 52-year old real estate agent, pulls into the hospital parking garage and after some delay, finds a free space. She hurries to the elevator, knowing that her 85-year old father, Mr. Kelley, is eager to get home after his three-day hospitalization for an exacerbation of chronic heart failure.
ECRI Institute PSO Deep Dive™ Analyzes Medication Events
ECRI Institute PSO Deep Dive™ Analyzes Medication Events
With this issue, Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare (PSQH)
reaches its fifth anniversary, which prompts me to take a moment and
think about how much the world has changed and stayed the same in the
past five years. When we published the first issue, in July 2004, the
patient safety community was discussing how much progress—if any—had
been made since the IOM published To Err Is Human five years earlier, and now we are assessing progress made over the past 10 years.
Lean Transformation and Culture Change
The “Lean” approach to process improvement—derived from the Toyota Production System (TPS) developed by Taiichi Ohno and others in the 1950s, 60s and 70s—continues to establish a record of success with healthcare organizations.
Joint Commission Names Top Performing U.S. Hospitals
“Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission Annual Report on Quality and Safety 2012,” includes 620 hospitals that are leading the way nationally in using evidence-based care processes closely linked to positive patient outcomes. The hospitals identified as attaining and sustaining excellence in accountability performance in 2011 represent approximately 18 percent of Joint Commission-accredited hospitals reporting core measure performance data.