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Staff at this community-based rural hospital in northwest Illinois that treats more than 18,000 emergency department (ED) patients annually and has a 13 bed inpatient psychiatric unit voiced safety concerns, leading to the organization's first shared governance project. An interdisciplinary team…
This project explains how a multisite, outpatient breast cancer and lymphedema rehabilitation program expanded into a certified, multidisciplinary oncology rehabilitation service line to meet the needs of the community.
Hospital readmissions for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure (HF) and pneumonia have negative repercussions for the patient, the health care facility and the community it serves.
Concurrent review of three core measure sets has ensured appropriate and timely patient care. The hospital revised its review process from a postdischarge review and abstraction to a concurrent review and management while the patient is in the facility. Diagnoses outside of the primary diagnosis…
The hospital identified two process improvement opportunities related to medication safety efforts: heparin protocols and capturing correct patient weights. The average time to intervention following automated triggers from the clinical surveillance software was 14 hours in July 2014. In the same…
The problem faced by the health system was the lack of a coordinated approach for the review and approval of order sets, including standing orders and protocols, across the division's four community hospitals. They were not consistently taken through formal review, and there was wide…
Because the medical center's lost charge capture related to IV injection and infusions totaled $80,000 per month, it established a goal of improving the process of IV injection and infusion charge entry. It educated its nursing staff and implemented a monitoring and tracking process through the…
While the implementation of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' venous thromboembolism (VTE) measure group gave the hospital an incentive to improve its recognition and prophylactic treatment of VTEs, its biggest motivation came from one of its own employees who acquired the ailment…
Chronic wounds are a growing problem in the United States. Based on evidence-based research of relevant quality wound measures and utilizing clinical practice guidelines, the hospital's wound clinic implemented process improvement initiatives to target specific care-based management techniques that…
The facility partnered with local emergency medical services (EMS) providers to improve early recognition of signs and symptoms of a stroke and reduce delays in diagnosis. EMS workers were provided training and a tool to assess a stroke patient in the emergent prehospital setting. Using this tool,…