Monday, October 16, 2006

"Fixing America's Hospitals" - Newsweek article

In the October 16, 2006 issue of Newsweek, Claudia Kalb reports on the innovations of ten hospitals. The innovative approaches to improving patient care and patient safety delineated in the article are as varied as the institutions themselves. I encourage you to read this important article and see if you, as a CME professional, can work with others at your institution who might be working on similar improvement projects. An excerpt:

"This year, more dire news: medication errors harm at least 1.5 million people and cost some $3.5 billion per year. What goes wrong? Missed diagnoses, incorrect drug dosing, failure to treat promptly. Experts agree that doctors, nurses, pharmacists and technicians will always make mistakes—it's the safety net around them that needs to be fixed. ''No matter how good people are, they suffer from being human and they're going to screw up,' says Jim Conway, senior vice president at Boston's Institute for Healthcare Improvement. 'We have to put systems in place that stop that error from causing harm.'"

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