The Quality letter for healthcare leaders最新文献

This issue takes a closer look at how five award-winning healthcare organizations are finding--and continually refining--innovative ways to provide high-quality healthcare. One of those organizations is Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton, which recently was named the fourth healthcare winner of the annual Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations recently selected two facilities in the hospital category--Stamford Hospital and Staten Island University Hospital--as recipients of the eighth annual Codman Award for their work in using outcomes measurement to promote quality care. The Reading Hospital and Medical Center received a Cheers Award from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices for its toolkit promoting patient safety. Sentara Healthcare System, top winner of the American Hospital Association's Quest for Quality Award, has been cited for its efforts to align its quality and safety goals with its organizational goals.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which shed a new light for providers and patients across the nation looking at patient safety and medical errors. Since then, new ways of addressing patient safety have emerged. But how far does the healthcare system still have to go?

In an attempt to avoid 100,000 deaths a year in American hospitals, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) proposed six new "changes of care" last month that have been "proven in both scientific literature and in experiences of at least some hospitals or hospital systems in the United States and abroad" to be effective in reducing mortality, according to IHI President Don Berwick.

Many studies in recent years have shown that many critical cardiovascular and respiratory events in hospitals are preceded by warning signs hours before the events themselves occur. Two facilities have created award-winning rapid response teams that are making a difference for not only the patients who encounter these critical events but the entire organization as well.

Promoting good regional and national electronic data sharing in healthcare will not be possible unless two goals are accomplished: An electronic health record is widely adopted by healthcare providers and an infrastructure for information sharing is developed, according to a new report from a public/private collaborative called Connecting for Health.

Hospital practice variations-not variations related to chronic illnesses, patient preferences, or the strictures of evidence-based medicine--determine how much care is given and how much money is spent on patient treatment, according to a series of 20 articles published last month in the online version of Health Affairs.

Patients are all different. As the United States becomes more racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse, healthcare organizations and providers need to address patients' varied needs. Failure to grasp the meaning behind the field of cultural competence could have serious consequences in providing high-quality healthcare.

Even though infection control practices have improved dramatically in the United States, surgical infections still are a problem for many hospitals, ranking as the second most common cause of nosocomial infections. But hospitals are finding ways to fight back by implementing best practices, redesigning systems, and using hospital-wide teams--which include administrators, surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, pharmacists, and environmental services staff--that cut across many departments.

In the quest to achieve better care, hospitals need to consider several factors that can mean the difference between success and failure. In a new report from the Commonwealth Fund, researchers sought to underscore these "ingredients for success" by studying what they considered four high-performing hospitals across the country: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA; Mission Hospitals in Asheville, NC; and Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pittsburgh.