Safety Demands Better Device Integration

Safety demands better device integration

Healthcare IT News

Mike Miliard

Medical devices and health IT systems are very different species, each with their own strengths and vulnerabilities. But in an increasingly wired healthcare industry, they’re necessarily becoming more and more intertwined.

At the day-long  Clinical Engineering and IT Leadership Symposium on Sunday at HIMSS13, healthcare experts explored the challenges of medical device integration, taking a close and often critical look at issues such as privacy and security, patient safety, human and technological error and regulatory issues.

In his session, David Classen, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Pascal Metrics and associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah, showed how patient safety must be the key driver for smarter device integration.

4 in 10 Hospitalists Report Unsafe Patient Workloads

4 in 10 Hospitalists Report Unsafe Patient Workloads

HealthLeaders Media

Cheryl Clark

Four in 10 hospitalists responding to a survey from Johns Hopkins University say their workloads exceeded safe levels at least once a month.

In a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, authors Henry J. Michtalik, MD, Peter Pronovost, MD, and others also said that 36% of the 506 hospitalist respondents reported excessive workload assignments exceeding safe levels at least once per week.

Hospital Staff Still Afraid to Report Patient Safety Concerns

Hospital staff still afraid to report patient safety concerns

FierceHealthcare

Alicia Caramenico

Despite 20 years of quality and safety improvements, some healthcare providers still hold back from reporting concerning events, fearing retaliation and intimidation, according to a new report from the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ).

The NAHQ, along with 11 other organizations, is calling on hospitals to incorporate protective policies that encourage better reporting in an honest culture of safety.

Statement Urges Accountability for Patient Safety

Statement urges accountability for patient safety

Nurse.com News

To enhance quality of care, strengthen patient safety protection and minimize costly medical errors, healthcare provider organizations should expect all clinical staff to be accountable for achieving meaningful quality improvements and reporting potential safety risks, according to a new statement from the National Association of Healthcare Quality.

The right approach allows healthcare professionals to feel empowered and protected when reporting concerns about potential risks and adverse events, according to the NAHQ’s “Call to Action: Safeguarding the Integrity of Healthcare Quality and Safety Systems.”

5 Simple Ways to Make Health Care Safer

How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us

The Wall Street Journal

Marty Makary

When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark about which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers.

Surgeon Sounds Off on Dangers of Hospital Care

Surgeon sounds off on dangers of hospital care

CBS News

Your hospital is hiding a big secret, according to Dr. Marty Makary.

He says hospitals are danger zones that can hurt you just as easily as heal you.

Makary, a top cancer surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, is the author of a new book is called “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You, and How Transparency can Revolutionize Health Care.”

Makary said on “CBS This Morning,” that unless the medical community can be honest about the problem, they can’t fix it. He explained, “We haven’t had good ways of measuring this problem [for] a long time. Now the doctors’ groups and a new generation of doctors are saying, ‘We need to be more transparent.’ I mean, look, I’m a part of a generation that says, ‘We as a medical generation have made some mistakes, we’ve done things that resulted in a loss of the public trust and we need to be open and honest about our problems if we’re going to fix it.’”

Disappointing Hospital Readmission Rates Remain Steady

Disappointing hospital readmission rates remain steady

FierceHealthcare

Karen M. Cheung

Hospital readmissions rates aren’t moving, despite best efforts to curb the number of people bouncing back to the hospital, according to Hospital Compare data updated yesterday.

More than one in five Medicare patients are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, Kaiser Health News and The Washington Post reported. With reimbursement penalties scheduled to hit hospitals in October,the readmission rates can be disheartening news to providers.

Hospitals Report Only 1% of Patient Harm Events

Hospitals report only 1% of patient harm events

FierceHealthcare

Alicia Caramenico

Although about 60 percent of patient harm events occurred at hospitals in states with reporting systems, only 12 percent of the events met state requirements for reporting, according to new report from the Office of the Inspector General released today that looked at Medicare beneficiaries discharged in October 2008.

What’s more, hospitals reported only 1 percent of the adverse and temporary harm events. Many of the unreported events that require reporting under state regulations, involve serious harm, including six patient deaths, the OIG noted in a spotlight.

Poor Patient-Safety Grades for Hospitals

Big Hospitals Get–and Dispute–Poor Patient-Safety Grades from Leapfrog

Wall Street Journal Health Blog

Laura Landro

Some of the nation’s best-known hospitals get poor grades on patient safety, according to a new Hospital Safety Score released by The Leapfrog Group, the health-care quality watchdog formed more than a decade ago by large employers.

Needless to say, the analysis wasn’t well received by the hospitals, which criticized Leapfrog’s methodology, saying it used outdated data and didn’t accurately reflect their patient-safety profiles. Some also said they had stopped participating in Leapfrog’s voluntary surveys of hospitals in recent years, and appear to have been penalized for doing so.

Aviation – Inspiration for Improving Patient Safety

Aviation Is an Inspiration for Improving Patient Safety

Wall Street Journal Health Blog

Laura Landro

Searching for ways to reduce medical errors and keep patients safe?

Look up.

That’s the idea of some patient-safety experts, who today will discuss the formation of an independent patient-safety agency modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, and other strategies to reduce errors at a summit in Washington.