The Ohio-based Hospital Measures Advisory Council has agreed to recommend reporting a list of hospital data, including rates of staph and C. diff infections. The panel has to make its recommendations to the director of the Ohio Department of Health, which will be followed by public hearings and approval of the final rules. The Hospital Measures Advisory Council was created by state law and charged with recommending public reporting of various measurements of hospitals.
Although the Texas Legislature have approved a bill to create a state Infection Reporting System, lawmakers failed to provide any money for it. As a result, Texas hospitals are still not required to keep statistics or report them to the state. The system, which was supposed to launch June 1, would collect data on surgical-site infections, certain bloodstream infections and respiratory infections. The information would eventually be made public on the Internet, but officials estimate that they need $1 million to get the system going. Although a committee is talking about the kinds of data hospitals should collect and how they should report it, the program's fate remains unknown.
Heparin manufactured in China and linked to dozens of deaths in the United States is now safe because of tighter testing and controls, according to U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. The FDA has linked 81 deaths and hundreds of allergic reactions to a contaminant found in China-made shipments of the blood thinner.
A randomized controlled trial has found that bar-coded, computer-assisted surgical sponge counting systems reduce the chance of counting errors during surgery by a factor of 3 to 1. Previous studies have shown that counts are falsely reported as correct in the majority of cases of retained sponges and instruments. The new study was based on 300 general surgery operations and showed that using a bar-coded surgical sponge system during surgery detected more than 10 times more counting errors than traditional counting methods in cases where sponges were misplaced or counted incorrectly.
A fellow from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement offers five steps hospital executives must take to get physicians engaged in their organization's quality improvement efforts. Physician engagement is important, he notes, be cause "very little happens in a hospital or other care system that is not the direct result of a doctor's order or the indirect result of a policy approved by a body of physicians such as the organized medical staff."
In 2004, President Bush set a goal that by 2014, doctors would be using EMR systems with interoperable standards that would allow them to share lab results, images, computerized orders and prescription information with hospitals and other health facilities.
But now many EMR experts say not nearly enough progress has been made in the past four years to reach this goal.