-
Discharge planning starts at admission. It's one of the most basic tenets of the discipline, notes Jackie Birmingham, RN, MS, CMAC, but one that is increasingly brushed aside as hospitals focus on utilization review (UR) and bed management in an effort to enhance patient throughput.
-
Survivors of Hurricane Katrina continued to suffer emotional and mental trauma and limited access to care and medications for months after the storm, largely because of a sharp reduction in charity care and lack of insurance, according to a recent report.
-
A growing number of health insurers is using publicly reported quality data to reward the best-performing hospitals, both publicly and financially.
-
During a January 2006 survey at Merrimack Valley Hospital in Haverhill, MA, Joint Commission surveyors looked closely at patient safety, medication reconciliation, fall prevention, handoff communication, and changes made as a result of performance improvement activities.
-
-
New standards for the credentialing and privileging of practitioners call for a more objective and evidence-based process for monitoring performance.
-
Quality professionals are making great gains using free resources to compare their performance against other hospitals, and publicly reported data can be a powerful tool to get "actionable" data for decision makers.
-
Project Dulce, a diabetes care management program housed at Whittier Institute for Diabetes in La Jolla, CA, has successfully addressed not only the difficult challenge of helping patients manage their diabetes, but also another issue of growing concern to quality managers: improving outcomes among minority populations.
-
At Baltimore-based Harbor Hospital, quality professionals were challenged to get staff to wash their hands 100% of the time. "Hand hygiene is the one action that protects everyone we provide care to, and also protects our own safety," says Patricia Moorhouse-Getz, RN, MSN, the organization's clinical analyst.
-
At Blanchard Valley Regional Health Center in Findlay, OH, every employee receives bonuses linked to the organization's financial and quality performance.
