Hospital Peer Review articles from April 2003

Hospital Peer Review archives from April 2003

Work with infection control staff to study and prevent sentinel events; more infections should be sentinel events, JCAHO says.
April 1, 2003... With the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' recent emphasis on investigating nosocomial infections as sentinel events, now is the time to start planning how you will coordinate a root-cause analysis with your...

RCA of transplant case reveals lack of redundancy; redundant validation put in place.
April 1, 2003... A root-cause analysis points to a lack of redundancy as the critical failure that allowed organs to be transplanted into a patient with the wrong blood type, according to information from Duke University in Durham, NC, the site of a recent...

Hospital achieves 90% compliance with pathways; JCAHO awards hospital with Codman.
April 1, 2003... Clinical pathways often are hailed as a premier quality improvement tool, but they also are seen as pie-in-the-sky solutions because they don't do any good if clinicians don't actually use them after all the fanfare of introducing them....

Hospital's award-winning plan for prescription drugs: some $150,000 in free meds provided each year. (Discharge Planning Advisor[R]--the update for improving continuity of care).
April 1, 2003... A social work professional at a 100-bed hospital in Indiana is getting free medications for patients who can't afford them with a program she says could be a model for health care organizations across the country. Using an Internet program...

Redirect indigent funds for prescription drugs; hospital spends $1 to provide $16 in medication. (Discharge Planning Advisor[R]--the update for improving continuity of care).
April 1, 2003... W.A. Foote Memorial Hospital in Jackson, MI, has dramatically increased the bang for its prescription drug buck by forming a medication assistance program (MAP) in conjunction with several community agencies, says Beth A. Smith, RN, MSN, MBA,...

Partnership gets drugs for needy patients; discharges are more efficient, staff less frustrated. (Discharge Planning Advisor[R]--the update for improving continuity of care).
April 1, 2003... Obtaining prescription drugs for patients who can't afford them has been a problem for Athens (GA) Regional Medical Center for the 18 years that Beverly A. Baker, CRC, CCM, has been with the hospital, she says. "With the rising cost of...

Spiritual assessment required in all settings. (Reader Question).
April 1, 2003... Question: Does the Joint Commission's standard on spiritual assessment apply only to behavioral health or to all health care settings? What are we expected to do in making this spiritual assessment? Answer. The Joint Commission on...

Standards set for HIPAA privacy accreditation. (Reader Question).
April 1, 2003... URAC in Washington, DC, recently released a set of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Accreditation standards for public comment. When completed later this year, the new program is intended to help health care...

HHS adopts final security standards under HIPAA. (Reader Question).
April 1, 2003... Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently announced the adoption of final security standards for protecting individually identifiable health information when it is maintained or transmitted...

Using customer concerns to improve quality: Part 1 of 2. (The Quality-Cost Connection).
April 1, 2003... Service quality is a high priority for most health care organizations. Unfortunately, failures in service and, therefore, concerns are inevitable due to the number of variables and perceptions involved in health care delivery. Feedback and...

CE question.
April 1, 2003... 13. According to JCAHO, how many infection-related reports has the organization reviewed under the sentinel event policy since 19967 A. 2 B. 10 C. 52 D. 112 14. Which of the following is not a...

Retained instruments: rare error or safety concern? Establish a strategy to make such errors less likely.
April 1, 2003... A Paper in the Jan. 16, 2003, New England Journal of Medicine has the safety community abuzz; are too many instruments and sponges being left inside patients after surgery? The paper, widely regarded as the largest and most reliable to date...

Pfizer to bar code drugs to reduce dispensing errors; codes can be read by bar code readers.
April 1, 2003... New York City-based Pharma company Pfizer, Inc. will use a new bar code technology on its hospital unit-dose products in an effort to help reduce dispensing errors at hospitals and pharmacies nationwide. The bar code system--developed in...

AHRQ unveils web-based medical journal; focus on medical errors in blame-free environment.
April 1, 2003... The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has launched a monthly peer-reviewed, web-based medical journal that showcases patient safety lessons drawn from actual cases of medical errors. Called AHRQ WebM&M (Morbidity and Mortality...