Category: Quality

MEwens
Quality indicators are supposed to encourage better health care.
But in the case of the elderly, they may lead to “unintended harms,” according to a commentary published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In general, these indicators encourage physicians to provide more care deemed appropriate, not to pare back on care that is […]

MEwens
If you’re a Medicare patient admitted to the hospital, the odds are about one in six that you’ll end up back in the hospital within a month. And there was very little progress made in reducing that rate between 2004-09.
That’s the not-so-good news from a new report by the folks at the Dartmouth […]

Amy Dockser Marcus
Pulling Fruit: Colorado-based Jensen Farms is recalling cantaloupes sold between July 29 and Sept. 10 on fears that they might be tainted by listeria bacteria, the WSJ reports. A multi-state outbreak of listeriosis has sickened 16 people and killed one of them, but the FDA and Colorado public-health authorities have not […]

MEwens
Are Americans ready to take up the cause of better-quality health care?
A new campaign, Care About Your Care, aims to get consumers fired up about the growing body of research that shows that health care in the U.S. is uneven at best and wasteful at worst. Studies in recent years have concluded that […]

MEwens
Ah, the simple act of hand-washing. It’s a simple, cheap way to prevent spreading infection in hospitals. And yet, research suggests compliance with so-called “hand hygiene” guidelines is less than 50% in many hospitals.
Proposed solutions have included penalizing doctors and nurses who don’t follow the rules, sending in undergrad volunteers to look over […]

MEwens
Can a woman and a pig chillaxing in a sauna convey the importance of cooking pork thoroughly? How about showing a shopper faced with a choice of a single dress in an empty mall as a way to convince patients they need to learn about multiple treatment options?
Two government agencies are using those […]

MEwens
What could primary-care physicians do differently to benefit patients’ health and cut risks, harms and costs?
The National Physicians Alliance, a 22,000-member group of doctors that advocates for affordable, universal health care, came out with its own list — lists, actually, since there’s one each for family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics. The group’s […]

Shirley S. Wang
In general, Americans think pretty highly of their own health care, a new poll finds. But they’re far more pessimistic about the system as a whole. And their personal feelings are tied to their income.
The 1,034 person poll, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and conducted by the Harvard School […]

Katherine Hobson
A program to reduce central-line bloodstream infections in intensive-care units is showing strong results, according to new data published by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
A new AHRQ progress report, overseen by Johns Hopkins safety guru Peter Pronovost, says that after 12 to 15 months of participation in the program, […]

MEwens
Aviation safety is often held up as a model for patient safety. Most notably, the whole idea of a safety checklist during surgery or other procedures was borrowed from the cockpit.
A paper published recently in the Milbank Quarterly, a peer-reviewed population-health and health-policy journal, suggests extracting even more lessons from the aviation world, […]