HealthCare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement articles from July 2009

HealthCare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement archives from July 2009

NQF endorses practices for safe lab medicine: focus is on processes that occur before, after testing.
July 1, 2009... The National Quality Forum (NQF) has endorsed a set of practices to improve the safety and quality of laboratory services. Past quality improvement efforts, notes the NQF, have focused on the analytic phases of laboratory testing, but very...

Scale measures quality of hospital discharge process: brief questionnaire is valid.
July 1, 2009... Researchers have developed various tools to give discharge planners and physicians objective ways to determine whether patients are ready to be discharged from the hospital to home. One new tool, called B-PREPARED scale, provides a brief...

TJC makes it clear: get surgical smoke out of OR.
July 1, 2009... The air is clearing in the nation's operating rooms, as The Joint Commission (TJC) places a greater emphasis on evacuating smoke from electrocautery procedures. In the accrediting process, hospitals have long been required to manage "risk...

ED/hospitalist plan improves throughput: collaboration also reduces diversions.
July 1, 2009... A new plan for admitting patients from the emergency department (ED) at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore jointly developed by an ED physician and a hospitalist, decreased ED throughput for admitted patients 98 minutes (from 458...