According to the Institute of Medicine’s Preventing Medication Errors report, the average hospitalized patient encounters at least one medication error per day. One in five errors harms the patient. More than 40 percent of medication errors arise during care transitions (admissions, transfers, and discharges from one setting to another) when various possible medication lists are not brought together in a process called reconciliation.
The U.S. hospital sector is one of the largest industries in the United States. It’s a $700 billion dollar industry, and there is twice as much money spent on hospital care than is spent on the purchase of new cars.
Dealing with the hard stuff – the very sick, the complex, the dying – is the essence of quality health care in an aging society.
Carefully done research on small numbers in a few settings will not be enough to guide practical implementation of process redesign.
While hospice provides a good model of care for the cancer patients it was originally designed to serve, it does not deliver efficiently or comprehensively what the majority of us will need.
While hospice provides a good model of care for the cancer patients it was originally designed to serve, it does not deliver efficiently or comprehensively what the majority of us will need.
Hospital readmissions in the HeartLink group versus regular care are lower. And when they do get readmitted … they aren’t as sick, and don’t stay in the hospital as long.
Ask any policy wonk to rattle off the most powerful ways to improve performance in the U.S. health care system and you’ll likely hear them mention payment reform. You’ll hear them talk about how the U.S. health care system has historically paid for quantity, not quality and these policy wonks will argue that successful health care reform must include introducing so-called pay-for-performance programs that link payments to outcomes.
Consumer Reports, which has been rating everything from cars to coffeemakers for the past 75 years, evaluated a different kind of item earlier this year: heart screening tests. The unprecedented move came after the magazine discovered that more than 40 percent of its subscribers had undergone unnecessary heart testing
Text4baby? No, babies in utero are not that tech-savvy, not even in 2011, not yet at least. But a program that sends free health and wellness cellphone text messages to women during pregnancy and the first year of the baby’s life has been getting attention.
