Errors reported by Minnesota hospitals dropped by nearly 20 percent last year, according to a report released by the Minnesota Department of Health. The findings suggest that new patient-safety efforts are starting to pay off, said state health officials.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston has launched a quality-improvement effort aimed at eliminating within four years all harm to patients that it considers preventable. The hospital has already begun measuring ways in which they endanger patients and plan to publish the results quarterly. Currently, nationwide surveys show Beth Israel Deaconess ranks in the top 12 percent for patient satisfaction, and the goal is to reach the top 2 percent.
Fragments left inside patients from medical devices may injure or kill when the pieces shift on their own or are pulled by magnets in imaging machines, regulators at the Food and Drug Administration warned in a post on its Web site. About 1,000 incidents caused by medical device fragments are reported each year, involving more than 200 devices, the FDA said. The most common were catheter guide wires to the heart, followed by bone screws.
If you've been in healthcare for any length of time, you've no doubt heard the name Ernest Amory Codman. Namesake of The Joint Commission's annual award for performance measurement, the Harvard-trained surgeon may have been the industry's first quality guru.
Frustrated by the lack of attention his fellow surgeons paid to patients after they left the hospital, Codman strongly believed that it was up to physicians to ensure that the work they did for patients was not only high quality, but continued to serve them in the months and years that followed. His "End Results System" encouraged physicians to collect data from their patients for at least a year after treatment. Eventually, the surgeon started his own Boston Hospital--called the End Results Hospital--and published the hospital's quality data in his 1918 book, A Study in Hospital Efficiency: The first five years.
Codman's ideas were strongly resisted by his fellow physicians, and his philosophy eventually ended his career. Colleagues stopped referring their patients to him, and not long after, his membership to the Massachusetts Medical Society was terminated. In the early 1900s, healthcare just wasn't ready for this quality advocate.
Today, not paying attention to quality is the career ending move. CEOs are constantly looking to not only generate revenue and promote financial growth, but also provide quality care to every patient. They're more involved than ever in making sure the patient has a positive experience at their facility. In last year's HealthLeaders Media Annual CEO survey, 53 percent reported their performance bonuses are based at least partially on quality and patient safety.
CEOs aren't the only ones paying attention to quality. HealthGrades, Thompson, U.S. News & World Report and others are keeping quality scores in the public eye and many states are jumping on the bandwagon, requiring the publication of death rates, giving of aspirin to cardiac patients, and other measures. In March, the first scores from the federal government's Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) will be released, and hospitals are bracing for the media's reaction.
Quality is indeed the most talked about topic in healthcare and that's why I'm proud to introduce HealthLeaders Media's new e-newsletter QualityLeaders. Each week, we'll talk about the hot quality topics facing hospitals today: Pay-for-performance, transparency, engaging your medical staff, and breaking down the quality barriers that exist in hospital culture. We'll also talk to hospital executives who are indeed quality leaders and learn how their organizations have achieved excellence.
I look forward to our weekly conversations and I hope you'll e-mail me with ideas and insights to make our "chats" beneficial for all of us.
San Diego County hospitals performing heart bypass surgery met state expectations in 2005, with risk-adjusted death rates close to California's average of 3.08 percent. But the number of bypasses has declined rapidly, according to an annual report released yesterday by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Surgeons performed fewer than 17,000 heart bypass surgeries at California hospitals in 2006--down 43 percent from 1997. In contrast, the number of angioplasty procedures, including insertion of tiny scaffolds called stents into arteries, exceeded 60,000 that year.
In this provacative opinion piece, Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, argues that Medicare and CMS cutbacks in reimbursements for crucial cancer fighting drugs could lead to a serious loss of lives. "Fewer drugs. Fewer seniors," he writes. "Maybe that should be Medicare's slogan for the future."