When I was first accepted into my graduate program for healthcare administration, I remember scanning the coursework that I was about to undertake for the next two years. While investigating all the classes, I mentally...
Healthcare providers face a number of difficult challenges in the year ahead, only one of which is to improve patient care while reducing costs. The way to success, according to Maureen Bisognano, president and CEO of the IHI, is to think differently about patient care...
Medication errors, patient identification errors, and surgical errors are some of the unfortunate events that take place all too frequently in healthcare. In the constant battle to prevent these adverse events, one word keeps cropping up: checklists.
Improving nursing-sensitive indicators (NSI) or organizational indicators with a nursing component requires participation of direct-care bedside nurses. Quality improvement (QI) programs designed by organizational-level experts to improve patient care and driven down from the top will not...
As cliché as it might sound, the start of a new year brings a new opportunity to pause and plan for the 12 months ahead. Even though many of us run operations on a separate fiscal year, where budget planning takes precedence for new strategies and projects, I’m a firm believer that the beginning...
Patient safety staff members at VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) knew they had a chance to increase their incident reporting, so they did something about it. And what they did didn’t require them to train hundreds of staff members in the large academic teaching hospital, but it still...
Do you or your leadership team know how many quality improvement (QI) and performance improvement (PI) teams your organization currently has? Does your frontline staff know the organization’s strategic plan and vision? Do your middle managers have leadership training? Do all your PI teams report...
