Quality & Patient Safety
The first step on the high-reliability journey is a commitment to transparency within the organization and with patients and family members.
Health care transformation calls for engaging hospitals, trustees and communities to ensure that all patients receive high-quality care. Hospital leaders need to consider a variety of issues as they meet future challenges, and several key issues link to equity of care. Providing…
Every day, it seems that a new hospital quality scorecard is released, sparking news stories about how hospitals compare with one another and against nationwide benchmarks. For years, U.S. News & World Report has ranked “Best Hospitals” in the country by state and…
Widespread application of a limited set of standardized measures could reduce the burden of unnecessary measurement of health and health care, and align the incentives and actions of several organizations at multiple levels, according to a report recently released by the Institute…
SNAPSHOT Hospitals that strive for high reliability aim to drive out the possibility of error and reject incremental improvements. In 2006, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center became the first pediatric hospital to receive the American Hospital Association–…
Improving patient safety is a goal at every hospital and health system. In fact, hospital and system trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure high-quality, safe patient care. First, the goals of improving quality and eliminating patient harm must be embedded into the…
The White House recently issued a five-year plan to fight antibiotic- resistant bacteria.
Reducing readmissions is an important way to improve quality and lower health care spending, and hospitals are making significant progress. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that the national readmission rate (i.e., instances when patients return to the same or different…
Organizational leadership’s commitment to ensuring the safe use of health information technology is one of several actions proposed in a Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert recently released to reduce patient harm caused by HIT-related events. After analyzing 3,375 sentinel events that…
U.S. health care access and quality are improving as demonstrated by a decrease in the rate of uninsured adults seen in the first half of 2014, according to a report recently released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. However, the 2014 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities…