As a follow-up to last week’s article The History of EMRs: Opportunities to Improve Patient Safety, we explore the philosophy around providing EHR documentation templates that include specialty-specific, chief complaint clinical content. Doing so provokes a few big-picture questions about healthcare information technology and the appropriate strategy for designing clinical applications that providers work with daily.
One of our goals at The Sullivan Group is to bring you practical pearls to reduce risk, improve patient safety, and enhance quality in your everyday practice. To that end I thought I would share with you this “alphabet soup” of healthcare risk management and patient safety tips assembled from years of observation and experience.
Over the next eight weeks, we will be providing information on EHRs/EMRs that have proven to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors and reduce litigation. In this first week, we provide historical context on the events leading up to today’s current state of electronic provider documentation. This series aims to help shed light on the improvements available for EMR physician documentation and to provide key takeaways to implement into your providers’ workflow.
With preeclampsia affecting 10% of all pregnancies and rates rising by 25% in the past two decades, it is important to test your knowledge and ensure that all your patients have a strong understanding of the dangers of preeclampsia. This is part II of a two-part series. Part I focused on definitions, risks, prevention and diagnosis of preeclampsia; part II focuses on HELLP syndrome, treatment, eclampsia, future risk and resources.
Our mission at The Sullivan Group is to positively change clinical practice, improve patient safety and reduce malpractice litigation. Because of this, we are often asked by clinical leaders and clients to explore the impact our RSQ® Solutions platform may have on other areas of the healthcare business. A Chief Nursing Officer with whom we have worked for the past several years connected with me at the 19th Annual NPSF Patient Safety Congress in Orlando, FL, with a similar inquiry. She asked if we had any evidence to support a relationship between our work with improving nursing competency/patient safety and nursing retention rates.
The case presentation will be a little different than our typical failure to diagnose an aortic disaster or other common “failure to diagnose” entity in emergency medicine. Although those are great teaching cases, there is another critically important side to the patient safety coin. It is critical to do the appropriate testing to identify potentially fatal presentations, but it is equally important to understand when such testing is inappropriate − testing that itself may by unnecessary and may actually cause morbidity.
As electronic medical records have evolved, so have physician documentation methods. Based on our observations in recent years, we have noticed that as organizations migrated away from paper templates, many only developed two or three generic electronic documentation templates for physicians to use (Adult Template, Pediatric Template, Trauma Template).
There are a number of laws in the various states that prohibit the abuse or exploitation of certain classes of people. The classes of persons who are protected generally include those who are particularly vulnerable to abuse and who may be incapable of defending themselves. The prohibition against child abuse is inherent in virtually all state statutory schemes and is widely known. Less well known, at least outside the long-term care industry, is the prohibition against the abuse or exploitations of the elderly and other vulnerable adults.
With preeclampsia affecting 10% of all pregnancies and rates rising by 25% in the past two decades, it is important to test your knowledge and ensure that all your patients have a strong understanding of the dangers of preeclampsia. This blog will be divided into a two-part series. Part I focuses on definitions, risks, prevention and diagnosis of preeclampsia; part II focuses on HELLP syndrome, preeclampsia treatment, eclampsia, future risk and resources.
There are four time-sensitive emergencies that that every practitioner of acute care medicine should master to deliver the best possible care in the safest manner: Code Trauma, Code STEMI, Code Stroke, and today's topic – Code Sepsis. Depending on the specialty, practitioners are involved in sepsis care at one or more stages of sepsis. In the office, urgent care or ED, the first two stages are paramount – early recognition and aggressive resuscitation. Hospitalists and admitting practitioners continue the initial management through recovery.
