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With The Joint Commission's recent announcement that rude language and hostile behavior pose serious threats to patient safety and quality of care, risk managers are on high alert for disruptive behavior and searching for ways to combat it.
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A first-of-its-kind survey of physicians by the Massachusetts Medical Society on the practice of "defensive medicine" - tests, procedures, referrals, hospitalizations, or prescriptions ordered by physicians out of fear of being sued - has shown that the practice is widespread and adds billions of dollars to the cost of health care in that state alone.
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The implementation of an online order entry system at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor has produced a 29% reduction in medication errors while at the same time cutting by 40% the time between ordering and administering urgent medications.
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Home health managers don't normally keep a crystal ball in their supply closet, but the ability to predict, or at least guess, at the future of home health as our country faces economic and political changes could be helpful.
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A shrinking workforce, expanding patient base, and sicker patients are challenges that many home health agencies are meeting with technology.
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Intravenous patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) improves pain control for most patients, but a recent study1 shows that errors related to this practice are four times more likely to result in patient harm than errors that occur with other medications.
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What makes educational material a must-read? The key is to make documents easy to read and understand, says Doug Seubert, guideline editor in Quality Improvement and Care Management at Marshfield (WI) Clinic.
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Between 12% and 13% of the people living in the United States are aged 65 or older, and of these people, 80% live with at least one chronic disease. Even when the chronic disease is not the reason for home health referral, care plans must take into account all of the chronic conditions that might affect the patient's outcome.
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At least 10% of infections involving staph bacteria were able to survive antibiotics commonly used to treat them, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report presented at a joint meeting in October of the American Society for Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
