Blogs. They provide commentary or news on a particular subject, can serve as a personal online diary and allow readers to leave comments in an interactive format. So what do blogs have to do with healthcare and patient safety?

In the March/April issue of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare, the article “Conflict Management from the Heart: A Day in the Life of a Medical Ombuds/Mediator” presented a fictional yet representative case of a medical error involving the unexpected death of a young cardiac patient.

Spurred by national attention to the tragedy of preventable medical errors, many hospitals have made improving patient safety and reducing the incidence of medical mistakes a top priority.

In his 2004 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush announced a goal of electronic medical records for all Americans by 2014.

I hope readers of the print issues of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare at least occasionally visit the magazine’s web site, www.psqh.com (where, among other things all articles are archived and freely available, without sign-in or passwords).

Conflict management comes in many forms — practitioners can be mediators, facilitators, >arbitrators, attorneys, ombuds, coaches — the field is constantly evolving.

Healthcare is evolving from a model in which the physician made almost all treatment decisions, unquestioned, and based on clinical experience, to a patient-centered model.

Clinicians long have known that hospital inpatients who have diabetes tend to have far poorer outcomes, require longer hospitalizations, and develop more complications, than do inpatients who are not diabetic.

For many healthcare professionals, the concept of hazardous blood transfusion is defined by concerns about transfusion-mediated disease.

Most industries have readily accepted that improved customer service will lead to increased customer loyalty, increased revenue, and an enhanced bottom line.