Quality & Patient Safety
While hospitals have made great strides in reducing—or in some cases, eliminating—many health care-associated infections, reduction of catheter-associated urinary tract infections, or CAUTI, has been an elusive goal. Now results from a national project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research…
Hospitals participating in the first four cohorts of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality program led by the AHA’s Health Research & Educational Trust affiliate reduced catheter-associated urinary tract infections by 32% in non-intensive care units between March 2011 and November 2013…
A blog post in Health Affairs poses the question: Will Hospitals Help or Hinder a Better Report Card? The answer is that hospitals and health systems have led the way in developing transparent reporting of quality and patient safety data.
Medicare patients admitted to critical access hospitals for common surgical procedures are no more likely to die within 30 days than similar patients at other hospitals and have lower complication rates and expenditures, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American…
African-American children were more than twice as likely as white children to be readmitted to an urban children’s hospital for asthma between August 2010 and October 2011, with socioeconomic and other risk factors accounting for virtually all of the difference, according to a study published…
Congratulations to all of my nursing colleagues as we celebrate National Nurses Week. It is important that we take time to pause to recognize the valuable contributions that nurses make each and every day. The focus of this year’s Nurses Week is Culture of Safety: It Starts With You.…
The American College of Surgeons (ACS) recently released Statements on Principles on the responsibility of the primary surgeon during surgery.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will host a May 12 webinar on its overall hospital quality “star ratings” methodology. During the 90-minute webinar, which begins at 1 p.m. ET, presenters will explain the methodology used to generate the summary rating for individual hospitals…
As AHA President Rick Pollack noted in his Friday blog post, this week we come together to celebrate the more than five million dedicated women and men working in America’s hospitals and health systems for National Hospital Week. How can your hospital get involved? Join the AHA’s #MyHospital…
Adding a spending per beneficiary measure to the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program in 2015 while decreasing the weight of the quality measures allowed some lower quality hospitals to receive bonuses, according to study published this week in Health Affairs. “High-quality low-spending…