The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has developed a new guide for hospital leaders and others who want to learn how to get patients and families to partner with healthcare providers on community-based patient safety advisory councils. The Guide for Developing a Community-Based Patient Safety Advisory Council was developed through AHRQ's Partnerships in Implementing Patient Safety grants program by a team of researchers.
New research shows significant variation in the quality of care provided by health systems across the country. In the findings, nonprofit health systems had, on average, quality scores 7% higher than for-profit health systems, and more centralized health systems had 5% higher overall quality scores than decentralized health systems. For the study, researchers with the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement analyzed data from more than 70 U.S. health systems.
A Japanese research team has developed a proposal for a remote healthcare system that will allow caregivers to communicate with patients through video and voice technologies, keep track of a patient's vital signs, and monitor a patient's food and medicine supply from a remote location. Researchers say that their system could address some important socioeconomic problems, such as providing quality medical care for citizens living in small towns and rural areas. Currently, people in sparsely populated areas of the country are usually required to seek sophisticated healthcare some distance from their homes.
The nonprofit Consumers Union is launching a new hospital-ratings service, which will include around 3,000 facilities. Consumers will be able to see a graph showing how intensely each hospital tends to treat patients, on a scale from zero for the most conservative to 100 for the most aggressive. Intensity of care is based on time spent in the hospital and the number of doctor visits, and the index reflects the hospital's handling of nine serious conditions.
Only one in eight cardiac arrest patients transported by Washington, DC, ambulances make it to an emergency room with a pulse, while in nearby communities the rate is twice as high. Officials say the city is meeting a national standard of getting advanced life support units to critical cases within eight minutes 90% of the time. Experts say success in keeping cardiac arrest patients alive is one of the most telling indicators of the overall quality of an emergency medical system.
A report released by The Commonwealth Fund has found wide disparities among states in regards to child healthcare. The report compiled an array of 13 measures relating to access to medical care, quality and cost for children in each state. Overall, Iowa ranked first and Oklahoma ranked last. The report also found that top-performing states tend to have lower rates of uninsured children than those ranked at the bottom, but also have higher health costs.