VCU Study Makes the Case for Pharmacists as Healthcare Providers
As pharmacies struggle to find their footing in a hard economy, a study out of Virginia Commonwealth University makes the argument that pharmacists could save millions of lives and cut healthcare costs significantly if they were allowed to help manage patients with chronic conditions.
New Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades Find Improved Infection Rates
The Safety Grades assign a letter grade to nearly 3,000 general hospitals on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents, and infections. The latest grades show hospitals reducing HAIs post-pandemic, after significant increases in infection rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cycle, nearly 30% of hospitals earned an “A,” 24% earned a “B,” 39% earned a “C,” 7% earned a “D,” and less than 1% earned an “F.”
Share Your Innovative Quality Improvement Ideas
Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare is seeking to spotlight the best healthcare quality improvement case studies. By imparting their in-the-trenches experiences and lessons learned, the chosen case studies will shed light on an issue, practice, or principle that affects stakeholders across the modern medical staff landscape. The deadline to submit nominations is 1/31/24.
The Future of AI in Healthcare: Transparency and Adoption
It’s estimated that AI applications could cut the cost of healthcare in the U.S. by $150 billion in 2026 and help alleviate challenges around staffing shortages. How can we merge the good with the challenging—and is healthcare ready to fully step into the ring with AI?
Vanderbilt Studies Value of Virtual Care for ICU Discharges
The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, focuses on post-intensive care syndrome (PICS), which can affect as much as 80% of discharged patients and leads to reduced clinical outcomes, poor quality of life, and rehospitalizations.
6 Ways to Reduce Length of Stay
Reducing length of stay cuts costs by decreasing the labor associated with caring for patients. Reducing length of stay also decreases the risk of a patient suffering an adverse event in the hospital such as a hospital-acquired infection or fall.
Improving Care Through Encouraging Patient Engagement
Most patient engagement initiatives focus on improving provider understanding of the patient’s status, which involves stratifying a patient population to identify pockets of disease and polychronic patients. This enables providers to educate patients about how to manage their conditions and offer outreach opportunities.
Stronger Patient Engagement for Improved Data Collection
Under the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program, hospitals will be required to collect and report patient-reported outcomes (PRO), risk variables, matching variables, and PRO-related variables for at least half of eligible total hip and total knee replacement patients beginning in 2025.
Technology Helps Surface SDOH in Patient Records
What do you do when you have the patient information you need, but that information is buried within the patient record as unstructured data? This is the challenge NorthShore Edward-Elmhurst Health sought to resolve when they determined they needed a better way to identify patients’ social determinants of health when they presented at the ED—one of the most crucial points in intervention.
ABQAURP News September 2023
There is still time to register! Join your colleagues on October 19-20, 2023, at ABQAURP’s Annual Health Care Quality & Patient Safety Conference at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater Beach, Florida.