Why Hospitals Should Disclose Medical Error

Each year in the United States alone, an estimated 4.8 million hospital patients suffer serious harm through preventable causes. This alarming statistic is the driving factor behind Press Ganey’s Safety 2025 Initiative, which challenges the healthcare industry to achieve an 80% reduction in patient harm by 2025. Accomplishing this feat will take a systemic rethinking of the approach to addressing medical malpractice.

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The Physicians Foundation Pursuing Social Drivers of Health Agenda

The Physicians Foundation has adopted the term social drivers of health rather than social determinants of health. As detailed in a Health Affairs article published last year, social drivers of health is a more precise term, which also does not strip people of “their agency to manage their own health and well-being—as though their struggles to access food or housing were pre-determined and thus unalterable.”

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Improving Patient Access to Their Data

With more than 20 million cancer patients in the U.S., many patients are interested in volunteering their data and experiences to aid in the creation of treatments, but there isn’t a formal mechanism for that right now. So 4medica has created a patient health record app with a user interface that enables the patient to assign their data, or even individual reports and documents, to a doctor or institution.

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How to Implement a Clinical Debriefing Program at Health Systems and Hospitals

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality provides a definition of clinical debriefing: “A dialogue between two or more people whose goals are to discuss the actions and thought processes involved in a particular patient care situation to encourage reflection on those actions and thought processes and incorporate improvement into future performance.”

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Tying Health Equity to Quality

The survey of more than 500 healthcare professionals found a sizable increase from 2019 to 2021 in the number of healthcare leaders who identify health equity as one of their organization’s top three priorities: from 25% in 2019 to 58% in 2021.

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