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Two health care quality collaborative organizations, the AQA alliance and the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), have formed a new national Quality Alliance Steering Committee to better coordinate the promotion of quality measurement, transparency, and improvement in care.
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Physicians at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, CA, who tested sponges embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags said the system accurately alerted surgeons when they deliberately left a sponge inside a temporarily closed surgical site and waved a detector wand over it.
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A task force of 11 Pennsylvania hospitals has developed a set of detailed protocols to reduce the risk of medical error when using color-coded patient wristbands. The protocols and a toolkit to help health care providers and facility managers implement them are available on the web site of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority (PSA) (www.psa.state.pa.us/psa/site/default.asp).
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The state of Louisiana has unveiled a new public-private collaborative that will redesign its health care system in response to the impact of Hurricane Katrina. The collaborative hopes to fund its efforts through a proposed large-scale Medicaid waiver and Medicare demonstration program.
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In the United States during 2002, asthma accounted for 12.7 million physician visits; 1.9 million emergency department (ED) visits; 484,000 hospitalizations; and 4,261 deaths. The prevalence of asthma in our society has led it to be the eleventh most common diagnosis in the ED. The direct and indirect costs of the disease are estimated to exceed $14 billion annually in the United States alone.
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By partnering with community-based providers throughout the state, Optima Health of Virginia Beach, VA, provides one-on-one intensive case management to high-risk members in its Medicaid disease management programs. Optima Health is a service of Sentara Healthcare.
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The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has named Swedish Medical Center in Seattle the winner of the inaugural Ernest Amory Codman Award in the disease-specific care category, for establishing a comprehensive program that deploys a coordinated team to assure comprehensive, timely, and efficient acute stroke care.
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Anew job can be overwhelming no matter what industry you may choose, but when the new job is in home care, saying that the job is overwhelming may be an understatement.
