HCPro.com: Quality Improvement Report

This informative newsletter is a 12-page monthly resource that provides you with the hands-on advice, tools (including data collection forms), and best practices that you need to ensure your hospital scores high on its quality measures and receives all of the Medicare reimbursement it deserves!

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April 2008 (Volume 3, Issue 4)	view entire issue

Med rec survey highlights compliance trouble spots
Originally introduced as a National Patient Safety Goal by The Joint Commission in 2005, medication reconciliation remains a challenge for many hospitals. HCPro recently surveyed 43 facilities to find out what methods, policies, and procedures most healthcare facilities use to implement the medication reconciliation process. Most are healthcare facilities in urban (44%) and rural (40%) settings, with the minority in suburban (16%) settings. Most are smaller facilities, with fewer than 150 beds (63%).

Follow these best practices to reduce falls
In addition to being the focus of National Patient Safety Goal #9, preventing patient falls has taken on even more importance for hospitals this year. Beginning in October, CMS will no longer reimburse hospitals for the cost of patient falls. Implementing policies and procedures to reduce patient falls can be a challenging task for hospitals and their staff members, but there are practical and effective ways to comply with this regulation. When implementing a patient fall prevention program, facilities should address three areas: communication, patient room adjustments, and identification.

Preserving evidence essential to effective RCAs
A good root cause analysis (RCA) is akin to the investigations done on the hit television series "House." You start off with a set of facts and drill down, using a cause-and-effect analysis, to discover what is truly making the patient sick. "In the case of 'House,' it leads to a diagnosis," says Gary Bonner, RN MBA, account manager at the Hopewell, VA-based Reliability Center, Inc., which provides hospitals with advice and software tools for conducting RCAs and Failure Modes and Effects Analyses (FMEA). "In the case of RCAs, it's an acknowledgment of the root causes and the physical, human, and latent causes of that problem."

Other recently-published articles from Quality Improvement Report:

Facilities making progress on infection control?related Patient Safety Goal

Be prepared for early warning system goal

Pandemic influenza risk remains high for hospitals

Gaining stakeholder support for SBAR technique

National Patient Safety Goals: The PI connection

WalkRounds involve senior leaders with frontline staff

Use FMEA to examine the causes of heparin overdoses

Three keys to readying your anticoagulant program

Diabetic patients with many comorbidities need higher levels of insulin

Antibiotic monitoring improves quality, reduces cost

SCIP expert: OR environment can lead to infections

Timeouts need to include the entire surgical team

Q&A with Peter Angood on Universal Protocol

Assess all patients to prevent pressure ulcers

Hourly rounding, huddles help prevent patient falls

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