Several high-profile recalls have focused renewed attention on medical product safety and highlighted the complexity of the recall process.

Converting an entire hospital to a new infusion pump system is a task that can seem insurmountable at first.

I may not be cheap, but I still drive a 10-year-old car with almost 200,000 miles on it. Everything works on it, but when something breaks, I quickly make an appointment to go to the dealership and get it fixed.

It seems that ethics has been relegated to a back seat in our personal lives as well as in business, healthcare, government, and politics. It’s paid little more than lip service in our post-Enron, spin-doctored, market-driven culture.

I took pages and pages of notes at the National Patient Safety Foundation’s Congress held in San Francisco in May, but the page I labeled “Thursday afternoon plenary: Jo Shapiro” is blank. Dr. Shapiro’s presentation was so riveting, I forgot to take notes.

Disruptive clinician behavior is increasingly capturing the attention of healthcare providers and leaders and is even making headlines in newspapers.

Over the past several years, clinicians and healthcare organizations have come to understand the critical role that medication errors — inadvertent and usually preventable — play in jeopardizing patient safety.

In many ways, it seems like only yesterday that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published its watershed report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (2000). One of its key messages, that an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors, is as sobering now as it was 6 years ago.

Early investment by businesses in information technology delivered very disappointing results through the early 1990s. Executives, expecting computer systems to provide increased efficiencies and worker productivity, realized few if any benefits from investing in these systems.

Central venous catheters (CVC) are appropriate and life-saving interventions for critically ill patients to ensure venous access to provide fluids, medications, and nutrition, as well as hemodynamic monitoring.