All News
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- From newborns switched in the nursery to medication mix-ups and hospital-acquired infections, we are all familiar with the horror stories about hospital safety. The safety issue in U.S. hospitals has become so profound and embedded, that we cannot hope to fix it…
(Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Cambridge, MA) -- During Dec. 9–12, some 50 patient activist leaders travelled to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) National Forum on Quality Improvement in Orlando, Florida, to share experiences and consider ways to combine forces to be that…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- In the book Leading the Lean Healthcare Journey: Driving Culture Change to Increase Value (CRC Press, 2010), by Joan Wellman, Patrick Hagan, and Dr. Howard Jeffries, every health care organization can learn from Seattle Children’s Hospital’s continuous improvement…
(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- What does the production line at a car manufacturer have to do with a doctor scrubbing in for brain surgery?
A lot, as it turns out.
For almost 10 years, Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle has adopted the essential principles of the Toyota…
I
n his new book, Essentials for the Improvement of Healthcare Using Lean & Six Sigma (CRC Press, 2010), author Diomidis H. Stamatis (aka Dean) presents solutions to the problems that plague the health care industry by providing case studies and explaining a multitude of quality tools and…
The term “never events” refers to particularly shocking medical errors that should never occur (e.g., wrong-site, wrong-patient, wrong-procedure surgeries). There are other terms used in official capacities for such errors, but none have captured the nation’s attention or perhaps done more toward…
(Morehead: Charlotte, NC) -- Morehead, the human-capital research firm, will host a webinar titled “Secrets of a Winning Healthcare Organization.” The free hour-long webinar will be broadcast on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010 at 1 p.m. EST.
Rod Wilkes, senior vice president of Morehead’s Client…
(Connexall: Boulder, CO) -- Connexall, a leader in enterprise middleware for health care alarm management, lean-enabling workflow automation, and comprehensive reporting, is helping to improve patient satisfaction at one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment facilities. The technology enables…
H
ealth care reform, insurance changes, more insured patients, never events, changing reimbursements, accountable care organizations, medical home—what does it all mean? How do we react? How do we keep up with all the changes? The questions are many, and the answers are few, so what do we do…
William Barsan, M.D., chair and director of the U-M Department of Emergency Medicine.
(University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Clinical trials in which participants are randomly assigned to different treatments by design are the cornerstone of clinical…
(IHI: Cambridge, MA) -- The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is offering a virtual professional development program for middle managers, “Leading Quality Improvement: Essentials for Managers.” This in-depth event provides 11 one-hour sessions beginning Jan. 11 through Aug. 2, 2011, plus…
(The Quality Group: Atlanta, GA) -- The Quality Group (TQG) has announced the release of The Health Care Series, which is process improvement (lean Six Sigma) training for the health care professional. The newly developed blended e-learning series focuses on condensed class times and highly…
(National Quality Forum: Washington, D.C.) -- To improve health care safety, the National Quality Forum (NQF) has endorsed a framework for the public reporting of patient safety events. The framework provides guidance that will standardize an approach to capture and present information about a…
(Summit Optimization Group LLC: Lizella, GA) -- Summit Optimization Group LLC (Summit OG), a woman-owned consulting firm specializing in the implementation of process improvement methodologies, has announced HEART and HEARTRx for change management with new deployment strategies and leadership…
(Quantros: San Francisco) -- Quantros, a provider of clinically-focused data management and decision support solutions for the health care industry, demonstrated several new patient safety and quality improvement solutions at the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) Annual…
(CAP: Northfield, IL) -- Medical laboratories and health care organizations increasingly face the challenge of needing to do more with less. Yet, the expectation of continuous high quality patient care—which includes competitively priced fees—remains high. To help meet these expectations, the…
(IQware: Cleveland) -- According to globally recognized futurist and innovation expert David Croslin, few circumstances drive innovation faster than being in a state of war. The U.S. health care system is now in a state of war. Consumers, government regulators, and enterprises are demanding change…
(The Delta Group: Greenville, SC) -- CareChex, a division of The Delta Group specializing in rating the quality of hospital and physician care, has released three new studies that reveal broad disparities between the quality of U.S. health care by state and metro area, and surprising regional…
(Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Cambridge, MA) -- Every year, the National Forum refuels the tanks of leaders of change, from executives to the front line. The National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care, Dec. 5–8, at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, is the premier “…
(RAND Corp.: Santa Monica, CA) -- When looking for a new physician, patients are often encouraged to select those who are board-certified or who have not made payments on malpractice claims. Yet these characteristics are not always a good predictor of which physicians will provide the highest-…
The multiwelled microplate has long been a standard tool in biomedical research and diagnostic laboratories but could become a thing of the past, thanks to new electronic biosensing technology developed by a team of microelectronics engineers and biomedical scientists at the Georgia Institute of…
(National Quality Forum: Washington) -- The National Quality Forum (NQF) has opened the application period for its 2011 National Quality Healthcare Award, which recognizes exceptional organizational leadership and innovation to achieve national goals for quality improvement. The 2011 award…
(The Joint Commission: Oakbrook Terrace, IL) -- For the first time, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals have access to an interactive tool that simplifies the process for solving the most persistent health care quality and safety problems that exist within the U.S. health care system. The…
(IHI: Cambridge, MA) -- It is the most significant health-care leadership challenge of our time: how to reduce expenses while improving quality. At first, the trade-off seems unavoidable. As expenses decrease, so too must quality, right? Not necessarily. Pioneering organizations that have worked…
(Arizona State University: Phoenix) -- Arizona State University (ASU) researchers have demonstrated a way to dramatically simplify testing patients for infectious diseases and unhealthy protein levels.
New testing instrumentation developed by Antonio Garcia and John Schneider promises to make…