The best experience for a patient is to receive effective treatment without harm, and then to go home feeling better. In an effort to achieve this obviously important patient safety and quality goal more reliably, hospitals began hiring the first “chief patient experience officers”, or CXOs, about 10 years ago. Now, CXOs appear somewhat to […]
What Is Your Organization’s Approach to Patient Experience? Read More »
Witnessing the harm or death of a patient caused by a medical error can be a traumatizing event to a healthcare worker. Unfortunately, the impact of adverse events on caregivers often goes unnoticed. While the focus of efforts to enhance safety rightly centers on patients, workers involved in or exposed to adverse events also become
Reducing Burnout by Engaging Staff in Patient Safety Efforts Read More »
Monitoring Transfusions to Save Lives Many people choose the hospital they go to for care according to the hospital’s reputation. A patient in need of aggressive chemotherapy, for example, might base the decision according to the reputation of a hospital’s oncology division, or as part of a thought process that reasons, “If this hospital is
Preventing Fatal Transfusions: How Frequent Monitoring Saves Lives Read More »
Compliance with hand hygiene protocols has been linked to reduced healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs). For example, an academic medical center reduced the incidence of HAIs for two consecutive quarters after the center increased its hand hygiene compliance from 30 percent to more than 70 percent (Vitalacy, 2019). Being able to establish this link within your healthcare
How to Improve the Accuracy of Your Hand Hygiene Compliance Data Read More »
“First, do no harm” is a simple, often-quoted phrase adopted by healthcare organizations dedicated to patient safety. These organizations would do well to establish effective hand hygiene initiatives aided by automated technology as an important step toward creating safety cultures. Taking every precaution to prevent harm starts quite logically with hand hygiene, which has been
A Perfect Match: Safety Culture and Technology Read More »
Patient Safety’s Impact on Hospital Margings A patient at risk for a fall attempted to walk to the bathroom on his own, after waiting a long time for a nurse to respond to a call light. He fell backwards, hit his head, and sustained a traumatic brain injury due to this patient safety lapse. Not
How Patient Safety Can Turn Liability Reserves Into Hospital Margin Read More »
Hospital patients depend on their care team to make sure they get well – it’s that simple. Part of that healing process includes purposeful rounding – “a proactive, systematic, nurse-driven, evidence-based intervention that helps (us) anticipate and address patient needs,” according to “The Value of Purposeful Rounding,” an article in American Nurse Today, the official
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Every healthcare executive dealing with patient safety challenges must deal with the realities of organizational culture, the philosophy of stakeholders in the organization in regard to patient safety, and budget. Many find themselves facing a daunting task with command of too few resources to attack the well-known but poorly documented problem of healthcare-acquired infections and
Improving Patient Safety: 5 Steps to Organizational Buy-In Read More »
Flu season brings a set of challenges each year—challenges further amplified when an outbreak occurs in a healthcare setting. From increased morbidity and mortality to longer lengths of stay and higher care costs, healthcare-associated influenza can place a huge burden on patients and healthcare providers alike. With this in mind, prevention is the ultimate weapon
Prevention and Control of HAIs During Flu Season Read More »
We are living in an age of Big Data. Thousands of terabytes of information have been collected on everything from internet behavior to RNA transcripts, spurred by the successful development of tools capable of analyzing massive amounts of information. Now, medical data—datasets from electronic health records and other sources—are joining the club. How might data
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