Memorial Healthcare Rolls Out New Protocol to Eliminate Wrong-Site Nerve Blocks
A 2015 article in Current Opinion in Anesthesiology puts its best guess of the frequency of wrong-site blocks as 7.5 per 10,000 procedures. A 2018 review of publications reporting on at least 10,000 blocks found a rate of 0.52 to 5.07 wrong-site nerve blocks per 10,000 blocks, unilateral blocks, or “at-risk” procedures.
Study Calls for New Look at Hospital Readmissions
Published in Annals of Internal Medicine this week, the study led by researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center looked at readmission records for 822 patients treated at 10 academic medical centers in the U.S.
Leapfrog Report Card Finds Improvement in Errors, Accidents, Infections
Leapfrog issues the report cards twice a year, grading hospitals on an “A through F” scale based on their patient safety efforts.
Study Questions Effectiveness of Performance Measures
The study notes that a recent survey found that 63% of physicians said that current performance measures do not capture the quality of the care physicians provide.
Analytics: Act Like an EIS Officer
The key to making analytics valuable to an organization requires managers to apply surveillance techniques, first proven effective by Epidemic Intelligence Service officers 60 years ago, to their reports.
Expanding a Telehealth Program to Serve More Patients
Instead of conducting telehealth sessions without any stated purpose, specific disease management questions are integrated at specific points in the telehealth process.
Doctors Learn How To Talk To Patients About Dying
Doctors can be so focused on trying to fix each ailment that “no one is addressing the big picture.”
Discharge Disaster? Shoeless Patient Abandoned Out In The Cold and Dark
While there are a lot of what-ifs about the incident, “we technically don’t know what happened during the encounter,” notes Frank Ruelas, MBA, a patient safety professional and HIPAA consultant who founded HIPAA College in Arizona. “However, there is enough information for us to consider asking questions on how we may have managed this patient if she had presented at our respective ED within our respective hospitals.”
A Push To Get Older Adults In Shape For Surgery
Researchers reported that older adults who went through the POSH program before major abdominal operations spent less time in the hospital (four days versus six days for a control group), were less likely to return to the hospital in the next 30 days, and were more likely to return home without the need for home health care. They also had slightly fewer complications.
EMR ‘Nudging’ Could Curtail Opioid Prescribing
Emergency Departments prescribe fewer opioid pills to their patients when the EMR default setting was set to 10 tablets.