Physician Practice

Focus on these four areas of improvement to avoid common safety errors

Medical Environment Update, January 1, 2019

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In the healthcare safety world, much attention is paid to the need for hospitals to ramp up their security and safe practices game, mainly because adherence to strict accreditation standards is closely tied to the Medicare funds those facilities rely on.

However, medical clinics are a different story, especially the smaller, independent ones. These smaller clinics generally don’t face the oversight of organizations such as CMS or The Joint Commission, and even OSHA only keeps close eyes on the clinics that draw their attention through complaints. So, without the discipline that comes with regulatory oversight, who’s to say that clinics are keeping safe practices?

In 2017, the American College of Emergency Physicians said in a report that the focus on patient safety must extend to the outpatient setting, where healthcare interactions far outnumber those in hospital visits and the risk of errors is just as high, if not higher, than in hospitals.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Medical Environment Update.

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