Putting A Lid on Waste: Needless Medical Tests Not Only Cost $200B – They Can Do Harm
Some experts estimate that at least $200 billion is wasted annually on excessive testing and treatment. This overly aggressive care also can harm patients, generating mistakes and injuries believed to cause 30,000 deaths each year.
Improve Quality Outcomes in Managed Care: Back to Basics
“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Technology and pharmacology are advancing rapidly. Reimbursement systems for healthcare services are in flux, and the sites for delivering healthcare are expanding to pharmacies and grocery stores. What remains the same is that people need healthcare and healthcare professionals provide it.
The Multifaceted Roles of the Physician Advisor and Influence in Health Care Organizations
We are in the midst of tremendous change in healthcare, and physician advisors are needed to be the lighthouse guiding our physician colleagues in the turbulent waters. The notion that a physician advisor only needs to know how to determine a proper level of care is well past us at this point, because organizations have realized that physician advisors can, and are, impacting healthcare organizations in many other equally important ways.
Medicare Failed To Investigate Suspicious Infection Cases From 96 Hospitals
Almost 100 hospitals reported suspicious data on dangerous infections to Medicare officials, but the agency did not follow up or examine any of the cases in depth, according to a report by the Health and Human Services inspector general’s office.
You’ve Got Harm
For 11 months, two AHS hospitals tried out an automated system called the Automated All-Cause Harm Trigger System (ACHTS). The system’s software uses 41 algorithms to monitor electronic medical records (EMR) for signs that harm has befallen a patient, with flagged charts sent to a reviewer to examine. By the end of the study, the ACHTS caught 2,696 cases of patient harm, compared to the 132 harms caught using the old sampling method.
How Much Should Hospital Trustees Know About Patient Safety?
They think they know a lot, research shows. But patient safety professionals are not as confident in trustee knowledge.
Five Ways Effective Use of Alerts Helps Improve Patient Safety
According to The Joint Commission, 69% of accidental deaths and injuries in hospitals are caused by communication breakdowns. We have more data than ever, but it resides in disparate systems. Caregivers don’t have time to sift through all the information to determine what’s actionable. This article looks at five clinical scenarios where sending proactive alerts and alarms directly to clinicians on their mobile devices.
3 Factors That Improve Patient Outcomes
Informal caregivers, postacute care connections, and direct care worker compensation can all influence patient outcomes positively.
California Hospitals Lose Ground in Quality of Care, Report Card Shows
Nearly half of California hospitals received a grade of C or lower for patient safety on a national report card aimed at prodding medical centers to do more to prevent injuries and deaths.
ECRI: The Rules on Copying and Pasting Medical Information
n 2016, the ECRI Institute’s Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety released its Health IT Safe Practices: Toolkit for the Safe Use of Copy and Paste. The toolkit outlines the risks and benefits of reusing medical information in electronic health records (EHR), along with four safe-practice recommendations on copy and paste policies.