By Susan Carr

Working with two patient advocates, the Reliability Center has released a webcast that analyzes the sudden, unexpected death in January 2001 of 11-year-old Justin Micalizzi immediately following surgery for an infected ankle. For 10 years, the Micalizzi family—especially his mother, Dale, now a well known patient safety advocate—sought unsuccessfully and without the cooperation of the hospital to discover what caused Justin’s death or at least to elicit a clear and honest pledge that the hospital would commit sincerely to understanding what had happened.

Phytel, the leader in automated physician-led population health improvement, recently announced that Northeast Georgia Physicians Group has selected Phytel and its Atmosphere platform to help transform all of its 30-plus ambulatory-care clinics into patient-centered medical homes by the end of the year.

Established by the academic teaching institutions and Harvard Medical School (HMS), the HMS Fellowship in Patient Safety and Quality is proud to present its first four recipients representing the Class of 2012.

The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) announced on May 9 that it has awarded a total of $200,000 in grants for two innovative patient safety research projects. The grants are awarded through the NPSF Research Grants Program, which promotes studies leading to the prevention of human errors, system errors, patient injuries, and their consequences.

Patients having psychiatric emergencies wait 11.5 hours in the emergency department, and those who are older, uninsured or intoxicated wait even longer, according to a study published online recently in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Patient and Practice-Related Determinants of Emergency Department Length of Stay for Patients with Psychiatric Illness”).