Few issues command as much attention in the healthcare industry as patient safety. As healthcare professionals and hospital administrators know, nurses are key players in patient safety programs.

Targeting medication safety efforts to give first priority to averting the highest-risk errors allows hospitals to achieve the most rapid and significant impact on improving medication safety.

The problem of patients developing complications during hospitalization and suffering morbidity and mortality as a consequence has always been present. But recently, intense attention has been focused on this phenomenon, as it is the primary cause of preventable hospital mortality.

After a brief reprieve during the 1990s, healthcare again faces the vexing problem of rising healthcare costs with accompanying increases in premiums and out-of-pocket costs for consumers.

Baptist Hospital, Inc. (BHI), in Pensacola, Florida, first entered the formal world of continuous quality improvement with the adoption of continuous quality improvement/total quality management (CQI/TQM) techniques in 1991.

The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have proven in healthcare as well as other industries to be an effective roadmap through complex and challenging conditions.

Patient safety is at the top of the agenda for hospital executives. Every hospital’s growth strategy presumes compliance with accepted medical practices and access to thorough and current patient information at every point where care is administered.

During the 1960s, the practice of pharmacy began growing and evolving. In response to an increasing number of patient injuries due to medication delivery and sterile compounding, the industry began calling attention to safety.

Many industry observers believe that electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) is one of the key steps for reaching our president’s 2004 goal of “most Americans having an electronic health record within the next decade.”

For the past three decades, cost containment, control, efficiency, and reduction efforts have remained at the forefront of healthcare policy, overshadowing innovation, quality, and safety concerns.