Many drug names are mistaken due to handwriting that is difficult to read or names that sound alike. The drug codeine, which is used to treat moderate pain or to control a serious cough, is sometimes misread as cardene, a drug used to treat high blood pressure and chest pain. The problem is not carelessness, but that highly qualified people are working under stress in a setting with many complex processes. Those processes could be improved to reduce avoidable errors --Leapfrog Group
According to the CDC, approximately 100,000 people died of a hospital-acquired infection in 2002, though experts believe the number is actually higher...There are about two million people who acquire infections in the hospital each year and become sick. Most don’t die, but some do --CBS News - Getting Sick at the Hospital (10.27.03)
Postoperative infections, surgical wounds accidentally opening and other often-preventable complications lead to more than 32,000 U.S. hospital deaths and more than $9 billion in extra costs annually...a 1999 Institute of Medicine report that said medical mistakes kill anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized Americans a year --USA Today - Preventable complications cost more than $9 billion (10.07.03)
On average, doctors provide appropriate health care only about half the time...Such deficiencies 'pose serious threats to the health of the American public' that lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year...The key to improving health care quality would be to provide performance data on all U.S. doctors --USA Today - 50/50 chance of proper health care (06.26.03)
The FDA estimates that the bar code rule will help prevent nearly 500,000 drug and blood transfusion errors and save $92 billion over the next two decades. About 40% of medication errors occur when a drug is given to a patient, compared with 11% that are dispensing mistakes, according to the American Society of Health System Pharmacists --USA Today - FDA requires scanners in hospitals (02.25.04)
Four in ten (40%) say the quality of health care has 'gotten worse' in the past five years, compared to 17% who say it has 'gotten better' and 38% who say it has stayed about the same. Nearly half (48%) of adults say they are at least somewhat worried about the health care that they and their family receive, including 22% who say they are very worried. --Kaiser Family Foundation Poll(11.17.04)
Obviously, Six Sigma can help doctors provide better care to their patients. But if those of us in the Six Sigma industry continue to partner with the medical community and focus solely on noncore health care problems, we're actually doing patients a major disservice. We're enabling doctors to provide the wrong treatments more quickly. --Quality Digest - The Elephant in the Operating Room (06.14.05)
Linking a portion of Medicare payments to valid measures of quality...would give providers direct incentives and financial support to implement the innovative ideas and approaches that actually result in improvements in the value of care that our beneficiaries receive. --Business Week - A Big Green Pill for Health Care? (06.29.05)
...the average major teaching hospital typically sees a 4% jump in its risk-adjusted mortality rate in the summer, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research [the new interns and residents typically begin July 1] --Time Magazine - Q: What Scares Doctors? A: Being the Patient (05.01.06)
It would be a great advance in both quality and cost if somehow the American public came to understand that 'more care' is not by any means always 'better care,' and that new technologies and hospital stays can sometimes harm more than they help. --Time Magazine - Q: What Scares Doctors? A: Being the Patient (05.01.06)
A landmark Rand Corp. study published in 2003 found that adults in the U.S. received, on average, just 54.9% of recommended care for their conditions. Average blood sugar was not measured regularly for 24% of diabetes patients. More than half of all people with hypertension did not have their blood pressure under control; one third of asthma patients eligible to get inhaled steroids did not get them --Time Magazine - Q: What Scares Doctors? A: Being the Patient (05.01.06)
The study assessed all wrong-site surgeries reported to a large medical malpractice insurer between 1985 and 2004 and found that the number of wrong-site surgeries conducted on limbs or organs other than the spine occurred once in every 112,994 operations (DPMO = 9, 5.8 Sigma). The good news is that wrong-site surgery is extremely rare, and major injury from it even less common. The less good news is that although site-verification protocols offer some protection against such errors, they are not foolproof. We have a lot more to do to ensure that wrong-site surgery never happens. --AHRQ Study Finds Wrong-site Surgery Rare and Preventable (04.17.06)
The federal government should promote integrated health systems built on evidence-based best practices, emerging information technologies with emphasis on teaching hospitals and clinics, fraud and waste reduction, patient education and consumer-friendly resources --Group suggests system guidelines - Citizens' Health Care Working Group (06.15.06)
The study examined data from 77,000 patients at 250 Premier-member hospitals that participate in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services pay-for-performance demonstration project, and estimates that adopting 11 quality measures for pneumonia and heart bypass care nationally could save as much as $1 billion a year in health care costs. --Improving patient care can reduce costs, save lives - Premier, Inc. (06.26.06)
At least a quarter of all medication related injuries are preventable, the institute concludes. A preventable drug error can add more than $5,800 to the hospital bill of a single patient. Assuming hospitals commit 400,00 preventable errors each year, that's $3.5 billion - not counting lost productivity and other costs - from hospitals alone... --Institute of Medicine - Preventing Medication Errors: Quality Chasm Series (07.20.06)
The report found enormous differences between the performance of health care systems as a whole and the top-performing providers. NCQA estimates that if the entire health care system performed at the level of the top plans, between 37,600 and 81,000 lives would be saved each year. In addition, the gaps in quality resulted in more than $10 billion in lost productivity and almost 65 million avoidable sick days... --National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) - The State of Health Care Quality : 2006 (09.27.06)
Providing better care isn't just good for patients. It can also be good for the bottom line. Hackensack's quality initiatives have made the hospital more efficient and have even boosted revenue, according to a 2005 article in Modern health care by the hospital's president and CEO, John Ferguson. Based on its track record, Hackensack persuaded managed-care companies to agree to higher payments, to avoid penalizing the hospital for helping patients get well sooner — and discharging them faster... --USA Today - Hallmark of quality care: Efficiency (10.19.06)
A painstaking review of charts for Cincinnati Children’s patients who matched certain criteria determined that, on average, each surgical site infection adds 10.6 days to the patient’s hospital stay and $27,300 to the bill --James M. Anderson, President and CEO of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Quality Digest - The Right Thing to Do, and a sound business model (03.26.07)
Traditionally, hospitals have addressed quality by recruiting talented staff, building new facilities, and investing in state-of-the-art equipment and technology. They haven't, however, invested enough in improving the processes and infrastructure that support the delivery of care --James M. Anderson, President and CEO of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Quality Digest - Teaming Health Care With Quality (05.12.07)
In some areas, physicians are leaving medical practice because of the cost of malpractice insurance, which reduces the availability of services to patients. Cincinnati Children's believes that quality improvement work is an important factor in its ability to negotiate substantially lower medical malpractice insurance rates for the coming year --James M. Anderson, President and CEO of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Quality Digest - Teaming Health Care With Quality (05.12.07)
When James began researching to compare treatment results, he found the discrepancies were staggering. "It turns out that physicians mis-estimate the truth about 20 to 50 percent," James said." He found doctors were far less accurate if they relied on their memories rather than on computer data. --ABC News, Doctor Changes Culture to Improve Odds for Patients (10.17.06)
A 2005 study of 3.3 million births in California found that babies born late at night were 16 percent more likely to die than those born in the daytime. Other recent research found that patients going into cardiac arrest at night were more likely to die. In a review of pharmacy and patient records, significantly more medication errors were made at night. --Readers Digest, Night Shift Nightmare (June 2007)
We know other hospitals and health care organizations can also achieve significant savings by borrowing productivity techniques from the manufacturing world and by changing the way they think about what they do. --Steven B. Bonner, President and CEO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Commentary: 'Lean Thinking' Can Improve Health Care (07.25.07)
...health-care providers are seeking managers with years of factory experience to help raise the quality of hospitals as they grow larger and more difficult to run. --Wall Street Journal, What Factory Managers Can Teach Hospital Wards
Companies in the manufacturing realm have earned a reputation for quality and efficiency unparalleled in other industries thanks to Lean process tools. The methods have helped make businesses such as Toyota great by enabling them to do the seemingly impossible: reduce costs while increasing quality --Business Report of South Africa, Healthcare: Toyota production system has the cure for the industry's ills (04.12.07)
We're using this program, these techniques of Toyota to engage all our people into rapidly improving health care...Park Nicollet claims the same ideas that produce sedans are now driving cost savings and improving patient care and safety --KARE Channel 11 News (Minneapolis), Auto concept drives Park Nicollet strategy (02.06.06)
In health care, we live in these little silos. People should be hovering over us asking how we implemented lean...One of the goals of lean health care is to awaken a new level of thinking and introduce manufacturing approaches that have been proven to produce excellent efficiency and profitability. --Alan Kent, president and CEO of Meadows Regional Medical Center (Vidaliav, GA), Vidalia Hospital Goes Lean (11.28.07)
...an Auburn University pharmacy study in 2003 projected the odds of getting a prescription with a serious, health-threatening error at about 1 in 1,000. That could amount to 3.7 million such errors a year, based on 2006 national prescription volume... --USA Today, Five-year-old took wrong medication for two months (02.11.08)
October 1, 2008, marked a watershed event in the pay for performance movement in healthcare. That is the day when Medicare stopped paying hospitals for care related to so-called “never events”—errors in medical care that are preventable, clearly identifiable, and serious in their consequences for patients... --ASQ, To Err Is Human—But Don’t Expect to Get Paid For It (10.1.08)
