HealthCare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement articles from May 2006

HealthCare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement archives from May 2006

ICU collaborative achieves major reductions in hospital infections: statewide program links QIO, hospital association, and hospitals.
May 1, 2006... Hospitals participating in the Maryland Patient Safety Center s (MPSC) Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Safety Culture Collaborative, a statewide effort to improve safety in intensive care units, are showing major improvements in the reduction of...

NQF seeks measures for reporting of infections: officials cite volume of infections.
May 1, 2006... The Washington, DC-based National Quality Forum (NQF) has undertaken a project to seek consensus on a set of national performance measures for public reporting of health care-associated infections. The NQF has solicited measures for review,...

CPOE study shows drop in hospital errors: errors included lack of adequate decision support.
May 1, 2006... In a study published in the February 15 issue of the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, (1) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) researchers, using a national voluntary medication error-reporting database, found that...

Facility works to ensure safety in bariatric program: most complications are preventable, experts say.
May 1, 2006... Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton (RWJ Hamilton), a recipient of the 2004 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, has just begun offering a new bariatric (weight loss) program; but long before it took its first case, it has been...

AHA establishes quality center for hospitals: better outcomes among its goals.
May 1, 2006... The American Hospital Association (AHA) has created a performance improvement organization to serve as a resource specifically targeting process improvement in the hospital setting. The AHA Quality Center was slated for an April 29 launch...

Patients deserve info on quality-of-care cases: regulations prohibit sharing of details.
May 1, 2006... Medicare recipients who have a complaint about their quality of care have a means of reporting their complaints--but it's unlikely they will find out the details of investigations of their complaints, according to the American Health Quality...

Does consolidation impact quality?
May 1, 2006... While a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation s Synthesis Project concludes that "the balance of evidence" from past studies on hospital consolidation suggests it may raise prices and lower quality, the report also concludes that...

AHRQ launches web tool for states.
May 1, 2006... The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has launched a new interactive web-based tool for states to use in measuring health care quality. The new State Snapshot web tool is based on the 2005 National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR)...