The Quality letter for healthcare leaders最新文献

In the healthcare environment, it's data, data everywhere. There are financial data, insurance data, employee data, clinical data, and so on. But when a healthcare organization wants more data on how it can improve quality care, does that mean it has to add more hardware, software, and personnel to monitor and analyze all the new data? Not necessarily. Some healthcare organizations are finding that they can use the data they already have--with a little help--to tell them how they are doing, how they can improve, and what they can anticipate.

Almost 3 years ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its pivotal report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, which challenged the healthcare community to reevaluate and reinvent the way it provides care. In January, the IOM hosted an invitational summit in Washington, DC to look at whether that vision is becoming a reality across the country and in local communities. The summit focused on five priority areas: asthma, chronic heart failure, major depression, diabetes, and pain control in advanced cancer.

Two new reports from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality--the National Healthcare Quality Report and the National Healthcare Disparities Report--provide for the first time baseline views of healthcare quality and use throughout the country.

Just over a year ago, SSM Health Care, headquartered in St. Louis, achieved a place in healthcare history by being named the first healthcare winner of the annual Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This year, history was made again when two healthcare organizations--Saint Luke's Hospital of Kansas City, MO, and Baptist Hospital, Inc., of Pensacola, FL--became dual winners of the Baldrige Award. This issue of The Quality Letter for Healthcare Leaders talks with individuals at those organizations--and also to representatives of two winners of the Ernest A. Codman Award (Baptist Medical Center of Jacksonville, FL, and the Cleveland Clinic Health System)--to see how their vision, dedication, hard work, and quest for quality and innovation helped them become award winners.

When it comes to information technology (IT), healthcare has lagged behind. Most healthcare transactions still are conducted via a paper route. Only a fraction of hospitals and physicians' offices have implemented a comprehensive electronic health record. With computerized provider order entry systems, the story has been much the same, with only about 10% of hospitals using them to transmit patient orders. But this may be changing soon. This issue of The Quality Letter for Healthcare Leaders looks at what is in store for healthcare IT and what these trends will mean to the healthcare community.

In November 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which brought to the public's attention the serious--and sometimes deadly--dangers posed by medical errors occurring in healthcare organizations. Exactly 4 years later, an IOM committee released a new report that focuses on the need to reinforce patient safety defenses in the nurses' working environments.

To promote quality in the healthcare setting, many organizations are realizing that they need to consider using teams to promote quality care. From establishing "a lean production system" to eliminating "waste"--in the form of poor customer service, employee dissatisfaction, and medical errors--to lowering average lengths of stays, two medical organizations found that taking a team approach can encourage good clinical care while improving bottom lines.

Many of the top issues related to quality healthcare are problems not just in the American health system but throughout the world as well. This issue highlights some of those international issues, including patient safety and nurse staffing, and how larger solutions also can be applied locally at the hospital or health system level.