All posts by Faris Islam
Readers’ choice: 10 health IT products healthcare leaders rave about
From Becker’s Hospital Review, a leading source of cutting-edge business information for healthcare industry leaders.
There are thousands of solutions in the health IT field. So, Becker’s Healthcare asked their healthcare leaders who are regular readers which tools got them excited.
Prista Corporation, provides the online ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence, which integrates Quality Management, Event Reporting and Investigation and Performance Improvement. Along with 9 other products ranging from chronic care to cybersecurity, Becker’s collected rave reviews from Becker’s Hospital Review readers.
Prista Corporation would like to welcome Fort Defiance Indian Hospital, the newest member of the ActionCue Team.
Fort Defiance Indian Hospital Board, Inc. services the Navajo community with a 50 bed acute care hospital and Tsehootsooi Medical Center, multi-specialty clinics. All of the facility’s departments offer Hózhó oriented health care, with the goal of bringing joy, happiness, peace and beauty to a patient’s treatment. They use the “patient focus” model, which incorporates K’é, caring, quality service, community partnership, and an effective, transparent organization, as a basis for providing care to their patients.
Prista is excited to announce Coteau des Prairies Healthcare Systems’ decision to become a new partner to the ActionCue team.
Coteau des Prairies (CDP) Health Care System is a 25 bed, critical access acute care, community non-profit hospital. They provide high quality health care services to Sisseton and the surrounding region, serving approximately 21,000 residents in both South Dakota and Minnesota. They own and operate the attached certified rural health clinic in Sisseton, the Browns Valley Clinic, and the Rosholt Clinic, and provide a wide range of health care services, combining the latest technologies with a hometown setting.
Top Healthcare Quality Issues of 2015
Source: HealthLeadersMedia.com
Six quality issues warrant the attention of healthcare leaders: misdiagnoses, star ratings, socioeconomic adjustment for readmissions, the end of Partnership for Patients programs, Medicaid parity expiration, and Disproportionate Share Hospital cuts.
Healthcare has experienced fascinating changes during the last few years, and 2015 will be no exception.
Major programs stemming from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are well under way, dozens of new quality measures and data galore are flowing into the public domain, and quality of care remains in the spotlight for providers at all levels.
There are sure to be tweaks, especially where measures and performance commingle to affect payment. But here are six quality issues that warrant your attention in 2015.
1) Measuring misdiagnosis
If physicians’ diagnostic accuracy were like air travel, one in 20 planes would not land when or where it should, and one in 40 flights would put passengers at risk of significant harm, or even crash.
Those are estimations from an April 2014 report from Houston Veterans Affairs and Baylor College of Medicine researcher Hardeep Singh, MD, and colleagues who say that 12 million U.S. outpatient adults may be given incorrect or delayed diagnoses every year.
Singh says reducing misdiagnosis must be a major quality focus for 2015 because providers and patients should not tolerate error rates this high.
Singh’s report in BMJ Quality & Safety estimated that 5.08% of outpatients receive an inaccurate diagnosis, and that half of those errors have the potential to cause severe patient harm, such as a missed opportunity to treat cancer at an earlier, easier stage. These misdiagnoses can result in avoidable or extended hospitalizations or even death.
Though misdiagnoses may be a patient safety issue on a par with medication errors or infections, providers don’t measure or track them. It can be hard to assign blame: sometimes patients don’t know or fail to reveal relevant details. But sometimes the fault is the provider’s, for failing to take an adequate history or conduct a proper physical exam.
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U.S. Boosts New Ebola Drug
The U.S. government says it will help develop a new Ebola drug — one of five drugs that are being tested against the deadly virus. This one’s made by North Carolina-based BioCryst Pharmaceuticals.
“BioCryst’s drug, BCX4430, is a small molecule that prevents the Ebola virus from reproducing in the body,” the Health and Human Services Department said in a statement. “Small molecule” means it can be taken as a pill.
“In non-human primate studies, the drug was effective against Ebola virus and Marburg virus, another virus in the filovirus family, indicating that BCX4430 may be useful as a broad spectrum antiviral drug.”
It’s being developed alongside ZMapp, Mapp Biopharmaceuticals’ antibody-based treatment; Canadian company Tekmira’s drug that interferes with genetic material; an antiviral called favipiravir and blood-based treatments using plasma from Ebola survivors.
Makers of a pill called brincidofovir have stopped testing it.
“We are making progress quickly to develop product candidates for clinical evaluation and to make products available that protect against this virus,” said Robin Robinson, who directs HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
More than 25,000 people have been infected with Ebola, according to the latest report from the World Health Organization, and more than 10,000 deaths have been recorded, although at least half and likely more of the patients have died, WHO says.
Officials say as long as Ebola is circulating, people can bring it to the United States. An American with Ebola is listed in fair condition at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. That patient and another 16 Americans were evacuated from Sierra Leone earlier this month.
On Tuesday, the University of Nebraska said five of the people quarantined there have been released after showing no signs of Ebola for 21 days.
…Story Continued On Original Site
Looking for ways to make your Risk/Quality Management job easier?
How would you like your hospital to have a ‘Culture of Quality’?
Save up to 30% on your RM/QI & PI programs.