National Quality Forum Endorses Two American College of Surgeons NSQIP Measures

Chicago—Two outcomes-based measures from the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) were recently endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF). The two measures, surgical site infection (SSI) and urinary tract infection (UTI), were developed by ACS in partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), as possible national outcomes measures that could be adopted by the governmental body as early as 2015.

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Medical Image Exchange Enables Faster Diagnosis, Improved Outcomes and More

eHealth Global Technologies, Inc. (eHGT) and OptumInsight will deploy an innovative medical image exchange service for HEALTHeLINK, a Regional Health Information Organization serving eight counties of western New York, including Buffalo and Niagara Falls. This partnership will enable faster diagnosis and treatment, improved outcomes, reduced radiation exposure and health care cost reductions.

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Johns Hopkins Collaborates with Lockheed Martin to Build Next-Generation ICU

The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality of Johns Hopkins Medicine is collaborating with the Lockheed Martin Corporation to create a safer and more efficient hospital intensive care unit (ICU) model. The two organizations will work to streamline complex and fragmented clinical systems and processes to reduce medical errors and improve the quality of care for critically ill patients.

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Provider-Friendly Terminology Speaks the Language of Quality and Safety

Medical Terminology Management

Provider-Friendly Terminology Speaks the Language of Quality and Safety

As a practicing physician, my peers often ask me what I do in the technology arena. When I reply, “standardization or medical terminology management,” I’ve usually lost them. And at its core, the goal of standardization really is not to complicate matters for physicians and other clinicians. Provider-friendly terminology (PFT) is an example of the kind of standardization our industry needs.

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Health IT & Quality

Health IT & Quality

It’s All About Jobs

What would Steve do? Steve Jobs, the 20th century’s greatest and most successful innovator, engrained that mantra into the heads of every Apple employee. Only those staff members who thought through problems the way Jobs did would offer solutions that were acceptable to their boss.

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Another Look at Aviation as a Healthcare Model

By William A. Hyman

It has been popular to compare aviation’s safety record and procedures to similar processes in healthcare, usually with the notion that healthcare lags aviation in adopting a firm safety-oriented methodology (Carr, 2006; Pronovost et al., 2009; AHA, 2011). There can be considerable challenges when making such cross-discipline comparisons including staffing, training, mission scope, and perhaps personal risk.

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Paper on Automation in Surgery Wins 2011 Human Factors Prize for Excellence in HF/E Research

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society congratulates Dietrich Manzey, Maria Luz, Stefan Mueller, Andreas Dietz, Juergen Meixensberger, and Gero Strauss on receiving the 2011 Human Factors Prize for their article, “Automation in Surgery: The Impact of Navigated-Control Assistance on Performance, Workload, Situation Awareness, and Acquisition of Surgical Skills.”

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