Healthcare consumers are increasingly aware of medical error and publicly reported quality measures.

With the increased focus on transparency in healthcare, it is now more than ever in a hospital’s best interest to have a robust peer review program that aligns with national patient safety efforts.

Communication in the perioperative environment is critical for patient safety and effective teamwork. Team members need to know the name of the patient, scheduled procedure, patient precautions and allergies, along with names of team members working together for a given case. Over the past several years, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) developed an intra-operative dashboard in collaboration with LiveData (Cambridge, Massachusetts) to aid in the Timeout/Universal Protocol process as well as provide these critical communication elements (Figure 1).

Following the passage of the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, the federal government is readying a final rule that aims to encourage health providers to report, learn from, and ultimately reduce the incidence of medical errors.

Soon healthcare facilities will need to absorb the direct cost of objects retained during surgery because these occurrences are now considered “preventable conditions” for which the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services won’t pay (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2007).

As gasoline blows past $4.00 per gallon, few driving experiences are more frustrating than sitting in downtown traffic waiting for a traffic light to change to green.

Much of the increased focus on improving patient safety in healthcare, which started gaining momentum following the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 1999 report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System*, has centered on preventing medication-related adverse events (ADEs).

Patient safety and the prevention of medical errors is a mutual goal sought by all in healthcare — patients, providers, and lawyers.

  July / August 2008 New Tools for MRI Safety Ferromagnetically Naked By Tobias Gilk     Photo courtesy of Metrasens Ltd. The recent Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert #38 on MRI accidents, last year’s American College of Radiology “ACR Guidance Document for Safe MR Practices: 2007” (Kanal et al., 2007), and a string of MRI … Continued

The Joint Commission’s standards for Medication Management (MM) are among the most rigorous and challenging for an organization to implement.