As leaders in the healthcare industry, we spend a great deal of time and resources analyzing patient outcomes and looking for areas of improvement. In triage, this typically translates to a leadership audit of triage decisions and a report back to staff on areas of improvement.
It’s important to periodically evaluate your audit process for effectiveness and sustainability. To evaluate your current process of triage record reviews, consider the following:
Preventable hospital readmissions cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year. As we move further into the age of healthcare reform, practitioners will feel rising pressure to reduce costs and decrease unnecessary and preventable re-hospitalizations.
Providers cannot and should not avoid the readmission of patients when medical or surgical situations require inpatient care. However, a fair percentage of unintended readmissions can and will be reduced by implementation of initiatives that not only improve quality, but support patients as they transition through the care continuum.
February is American Heart Month and an appropriate time to recognize the recent reduction in mortality rate from cardiovascular disease in women. The increased awareness of women and healthcare professionals has resulted in better care and is at least partially responsible for the lower death rate from heart disease seen over the past decade.
However, the battle against women’s heart disease is far from over. Awareness has improved, but the realities of heart disease in women remain underappreciated.
Given that proven effective solutions exist today, why haven't more institutions implemented programs that have proven to reduce diagnostic errors?
I listened with great interest to the interview conducted by Dr. Robert Wachter with Dr. Mark Graber in the January 2016 podcast of “Perspectives on Safety,” also published in the AHRQ PSNet.
Funding a patient safety program can be challenging, especially when the return on investment is constantly under scrutiny. While the ultimate goal of your program is safer care of patients, there are also measurable financial benefits that result from reduction in claims and malpractice litigation. Professional liability carriers, whether commercial or self-insured, also have a vested interest in your patient safety measures.
Depending upon how your organization insures its HPL/MPL coverage, there are several options for funding your patient safety program.
A recent Ob.Gyn. News article reported that the State of Iowa has joined Oregon and Massachusetts in passing a comprehensive disclosure law. The apology laws from these three states go beyond the simple immunity for empathy or apology that exists in 36 other states. Instead, they lay the foundation for the development of actual disclosure programs that help consumers and clinicians communicate and resolve differences post-event, including compensation for serious harm or death caused by malpractice.
It is certainly a good idea to avoid readmissions that are deemed unnecessary. However, from the vantage point of risk and patient safety, the sword of readmissions reduction has another sharp and dangerous edge. Plain and simple, along with sensible system solutions, there will be irrational but powerful pressures exerted on the gatekeepers of inpatient admission to send sick patients home rather than readmit them.
The patient satisfaction survey, HCAHPS, reflects patients’ perspectives of their hospital experience. The survey results are used to compare hospitals to each other using measures that are significant to healthcare consumers. HCAHPS scores are used by CMS to determine a slice of reimbursement to hospitals, making up 25% of a hospital’s Total Performance Score in the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program for 2016.
The following case is from an online CME course by Dan Sullivan, MD, JD, FACEP. The course, Batch Events - Catastrophic System Risk, explores the question:
What is a batch medical incident or batch claim and why read a course on this subject?
Batch medical incident is a term coined by the insurance industry to recognize and manage a certain type of legal claim.
Providing a better patient experience continues to challenge hospitals and other medical facilities, despite:
What prompted this deluge of interest?
