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.

In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, a provider’s quick diagnosis and suggested treatment makes the difference in whether a patient has a positive or negative outcome.

If big numbers impress you, consider that, according to Bradley Sokol, CEO of Fast Track Technologies (FTT), the application of radio frequency identification (RFID) and related technologies in the hospital marketplace will increase to $8.8 billion in just 4 years, in 2010.

The Institute of Medicine’s report To Err Is Human focused national attention on the need to improve medication safety to prevent harm (IOM, 2000). Medication errors with the greatest potential to cause significant patient harm are those involving high-risk drugs.