ISMP

ISMP

Evidence-Based Medicine Doesn’t Preclude Common Sense

If you went skydiving, would you first ask for scientific evidence from a randomized trial that a properly functioning parachute prevents injury before you’d consider using one during your freefall? Hardly.

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Health IT & Quality

Health IT & Quality

Show Me the Money

The most important lesson in medical care comes from a bank robber who stole more than $2 million and spent more than half his life in jail. Named for Willie Sutton, one of the most prolific bank robbers in history, Sutton’s law grew out of a famous response to a reporter’s question attributed (perhaps falsely) to Sutton.

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Consumers as Partners

Consumers as Partners

How Patient-Provider Engagement Can Transform Patient Safety

How would the world change if, suddenly, clinicians had a highly motivated partner in carrying out each care plan? I propose that a new level of safety will be possible if we shift to a shared care plan model, with patients and families aware of the plan and engaged in its execution.

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Editor’s Notebook

Editor’s Notebook

Ambulatory Practices Join the Conversation

Ambulatory practices find themselves in the patient safety spotlight with increasing frequency, for a number of reasons: more attention is being paid to diagnostic errors, which often trace back to physician practices; with implementation of electronic health records, more data will be available and analyzed for medical care delivered in ambulatory settings; and as improvement efforts in hospitals mature, it simply is time to bring more of healthcare into the safety conversation.

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Fortify HIT Contracts with Education and Ethics to Protect Patient Safety, Say Informatics Experts

An original and progressive report on health information technology (HIT) vendors, their customers and patients, published online, makes ground-breaking recommendations for new practices that target the reduction or elimination of tensions that currently mar relationships between many HIT vendors and their customers, specifically with regard to indemnity and error management of HIT systems.

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