MITSS presented Jeanine Thomas, president of the MRSA Survivors Network, with this year’s HOPE Award. MITSS, or Medically Induced Trauma Support Services, Inc., is a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 whose mission is to support healing and restore hopeto patients, families, and clinicians impacted by adverse medical events. The MITSS HOPE Award, first given out in 2008, recognizes the people and organizations that support the people affected by those events.

By Mel Bradley, MD, MSPH

Haddon’s matrix is an incident analysis and prevention tool composed of two dimensions: rows equating to incident phases and columns representing the epidemiological triad of host, agent, and environment (Figure 1) (Haddon, 1980). The pre-incident and incident cells are filled with factors that have contributed to an incident or potential contributors to an anticipated incident. Mitigation controls to help prevent similar incidents from occurring are delineated in the post-incident cells.

By Hardeep Singh,MD, MPH; and Dean F. Sittig, PhD

It’s rare to attend a conference on quality, safety, or informatics without feeling the excitement of “big data,” a loose term referring to large volumes of interconnected (and often unverified) data that may be updated and processed rapidly.

By Mitch Work, MPA, FHIMSS

Many healthcare organizations are currently seeking to leverage the potential benefits of the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT), where objects have network connectivity and data can be shared and analyzed, resulting in better, more efficient healthcare and giving patients the power to proactively care for themselves.

By Nazanin Kuseh Kalani Yazd

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus approaches interprofessional education in a manner that mimics the reality of working on an interprofessional team. To prepare students to work in a field that requires coordination across many different disciplines, the University of Colorado takes advantage of the diversity at its health sciences campus by bringing together students from six professional schools in one interprofessional course. In the Interprofessional Education and Development (IPED) course, students in the medical, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and physician assistant programs collaborate to solve team-based exercises in 16 two-hour sessions over the course of two years.

By Anne V. Irving, MA, FACHE, CPHRM, DFASHRM

Human factors studies indicate that distractions and multitasking increase the likelihood of error (Feil, 2013; Wiegmann, ElBardissi, Dearani, Daly, & Sundt, 2007). Allowing personnel to bring their cell phones, smartphones, or other mobile devices into a surgical suite introduces a new distraction into an already complex, noisy, high-stakes environment.

By Charlie Berg, BA, BSEE

In recent years, hospitals have made great strides in the adoption of electronic health records (EHR). As of 2014, 76% of hospitals in the United States were employing an EHR system to manage clinical information (American Hospital Association, 2015). The perioperative staff is now looking for improvements to their workflow and work environment from these electronic systems, seeking patient-safety focused integration of information carefully selected from the growing flood of electronic data.

By Anne Press

The traditional medical school curriculum has a heavy scientific focus, especially in the first two years. In an already jam-packed curriculum, it can be difficult to replace any of the materials with improvement science. To combat this, Hofstra-North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine launched—with the school’s inaugural class in 2011—a four-year curriculum in patient safety, quality, and effectiveness.

By Barry P. Chaiken, MD, MPH

Although I’m a physician, not a technology expert, I’m jazzed about the FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) specification. Organizations struggle to share patient information with each other due to data structure and definition incompatibilities. This lack of interoperability forces physicians to treat patients without the benefit of a complete patient record, which leads to duplicate testing, unnecessary procedures, misdiagnoses, and medical errors.

Measurement is central to current discussions about the state of patient safety, as well as federal healthcare reform and efforts to move toward value-based purchasing. Using data to understand, drive, and evaluate improvement efforts has a long history. In fact, the patient safety movement was launched by a memorable data point: medical errors cause between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths each year in the United States (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000). And the axiom “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” is a touchstone for quality improvement.