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Risk & Quality Management

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  • CDC updates surgical site infection guidelines

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated guidelines for preventing surgical-site infections, focusing on some difficult issues in an exhaustive and largely futile attempt to find conclusive data on various practices.
  • How hot is too hot for patients?

    A decade ago, ECRI investigated a series of incidents in which patients were burned sometimes severely by blankets that were warmed to a high temperature and placed on body parts that either temporarily or permanently lacked sensation.
  • Transition to ICD-10 code sets delayed

    On April 1, 2014, President Obama signed into law the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, which directs the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to postpone post-payment audits of the two-midnight rule until after March 31, 2015.
  • Why QI plus IP is more than alphabet soup

    It seems impossible when she recalls it, but Kathleen Kohut, MSN, CIC, CNOR, director of infection prevention at Cone Health System in Winston-Salem, NC, tells a story of an infection prevention department that was left out of the discussion of meeting infection prevention standards for an upcoming Joint Commission survey.
  • CDC updates hospital infection data

    If it seems as if your hospital takes two steps forward and one back when trying to conquer healthcare-associated infection rates, you arent alone.
  • Public quality reporting: a plea for consistency

    Every few months, another big headline is splashed across the mainstream media, touting the top 100 hospitals, or the best cancer doctors, or your citys number-one neurologist. But what is missing from these stories is the fact that often, a facility or physician can rank in different places on different lists fabulous on one, middling on another.
  • Same strains still mean new shots

    Next seasons trivalent influenza vaccines will contain the same strains as this years vaccine but its still important to get the annual flu vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • Only a 50% adherence rate to infection control in ICUs

    Hospital intensive care units (ICUs) in the U.S. report a high level of infection prevention policies in place, but the numbers fall off sharply when actual adherence to the interventions are factored in, researchers report.
  • Policies should address difficult HIPAA scenarios

    There can be murky situations in which the right interpretation of HIPAA is not obvious, says Patricia Wagner, JD, an attorney with the law firm of Epstein Becker Green in Washington, DC.
  • HHS considering change for background checks

    A proposed change to HIPAA might help healthcare providers alert law enforcement agencies that a persons mental illness should be considered when allowing a gun purchase, an action that is made difficult and sometimes impossible by the convergence of HIPAA and state laws.