The Emory Experience: Quality Improvement Skills Labs in Interdisciplinary Education
By Ariadne K. DeSimone In spring 2014, one day after taking my Step 2 Clinical Knowledge of the United States Medical Licensure Examination (USMLE), I finally had time to turn my attention to thoughts about my future and to the email messages that had accumulated over the past month. One announcement stood out: The Emory … Continued
DebMed Announces Results of 2015 Survey on Hand Hygiene
DebMed® has announced the results of its 4th annual survey on the state of healthcare hand hygiene compliance. Results from more than 850 healthcare professionals throughout North America show that while improved methods for gathering reliable data with electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring are known to contribute to increased hand hygiene compliance, competing healthcare priorities … Continued
Physical Therapy Joins the Movement
By Susan Carr This year’s annual conference of the American Physical Therapy Association’s Massachusetts chapter (APTAMA) focused on a microcosm of issues in healthcare improvement: value, collaboration, measurement, and spread. After hearing Alan M. Jette, PT, PhD, FAPTA, deliver the keynote address, “System Thinking to Thrive in a Changing Health Care Environment,” I participated on … Continued
The Emory Experience: Quality Improvement Skills Labs in Interdisciplinary Education
By Ariadne K. DeSimone In spring 2014, one day after taking my Step 2 Clinical Knowledge of the United States Medical Licensure Examination (USMLE), I finally had time to turn my attention to thoughts about my future and to the email messages that had accumulated over the past month. One announcement stood out: The … Continued
ECRI Institute Issues Technology Hazards List for 2016
Reprocessing of flexible endoscopes rises to #1 hazard; failure to recognize clinical alarms, health IT errors and other issues remain perennial hazards. Every year hospitals are blindsided and patients are harmed by unexpected health technology hazards. Medical technology is intended to improve patient care, but even the best technology—if configured, used, or maintained improperly—can lead … Continued
New Sentinel Event Alert Focuses on Preventing Patient Falls
Preventing patient falls and fall-related injuries is the focus of the Sentinel Event Alert: Issue 55 released by The Joint Commission. The new alert examines the contributing factors to patient falls and includes suggested solutions to be implemented by health care organizations to help reduce patient falls and falls with injury, according to the press … Continued
Study Finds Higher Rates of Perioperative Medication Errors than Previous Research
A study published in the October 2015 issue of Anesthesiology reports on the frequency of medication errors and adverse events in the perioperative setting. The rates of errors and events were significantly higher than documented by previous studies. The recent study found: A drug error or adverse drug event occurred in approximately 1 in 20 … Continued
Study Shows Positive Effects From UVC Robot
A new study on use of UV light in the short C-wavelength (UVC) for disinfection was presented at IDWeek 2015. The study showed that Tru-D SmartUVC significantly reduced healthcare-associated infections (HAI) caused by common multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO) in hospitals. Tru-D SmartUVC was the UVC device selected for this study and proved its ability to reduce … Continued
AMA and MedStar Health Partner to Improve EHR Usability
In an effort to promote transparency around how electronic health records (EHRs) are designed and user-tested, and drive improvements in clinician support and patient safety, the American Medical Association (AMA) and MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare have developed a comparative EHR User-Centered Design Evaluation Framework that reveals a lack of focus … Continued
Team-Based Learning and Student-Run Clinic Support Interdisciplinary Education
By Nazanin Kuseh Kalani Yazd The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus approaches interprofessional education in a manner that mimics the reality of working on an interprofessional team. To prepare students to work in a field that requires coordination across many different disciplines, the University of Colorado takes advantage of the diversity at its health … Continued