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The conventional wisdom in research circles is that IRBs are the main drag on the process, slowing down the progress of a clinical trial with an unnecessarily complicated review system.
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A major pharmaceutical company is leading the way to making accreditation as ubiquitous among IRBs as it is among health care organizations.
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Electronic IRB submission technology can be of great use to even small research institutions, once it's integrated with existing technology.
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IRBs often seek new members who are experienced scientists, professors, and medical doctors. But they might be missing an opportunity to educate and engage young scientists by overlooking that pool of potential ethics board members.
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With all the attention that's been paid to patient safety in recent years, one would have hoped for better results. But as the latest HealthGrades analysis of patient safety among Medicare patients shows, we still have a long way to go.
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At press time, The Leapfrog Group released its own survey showing some disappointing results in terms of hospital quality and safety. According to the 2008 Leapfrog Hospital Survey, only 7% of hospitals fully meet Leapfrog medication error prevention and CPOE standards, and low percentages of hospitals are fully meeting mortality standards.
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A patient's chart is unavailable. Verbal orders are not yet written in the patient's chart. The identification bracelet is not yet on your patient. These are three reasons that an ED nurse may fail to comply with one of The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs): the requirement for use of at least two patient identifiers.
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A scourge of hospitals for decades, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) may finally be on the run, and it's moving in the right direction: from the bedside to the "C-suite." In initiatives that speak to both quality and cost-savings, hospital CEOs are putting their considerable clout behind infection prevention efforts against the most highly publicized health care-associated infection (HAI).
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Infection prevention efforts appear to be making a dramatic difference in hospital intensive care units, which are reporting declining rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) central line-associated bloodstream infections (BSIs), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports.
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You might think that with a surgical site infection rate of 0% you could rest on your laurels, but that's not the attitude of the quality professionals and staff members at Hawaii Medical Center East in Honolulu. Despite achieving such a "perfect" score, they decided to dig deeper and find additional ways to improve.
