Even though it is summertime, we are in the midst of dramatic developments forÝimproving patient safety.

In June 2003, Stony Brook University Hospital, a 504-bed tertiary care facility on Long Island, New York, performed a review of door-to-PTCA (percutaneous transluminal angioplasty) times, which revealed…

The complexity of the Medicare Part D drug benefit can be grasped when one tries to navigate the hundreds of pages available on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Web site.

Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a surgeon and writer whose work focuses on understanding medical errors and improving the performance of physicians.

The application of proven aviation crew resource management (CRM) technology and training to the reduction of medical errors is a steadily emerging area of human factors.

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.