A recent report from a federal watchdog agency offers new insight into the barriers hospitals still face when it comes to addressing patient safety concerns, offering a concise distillation of the key gaps that remain in ongoing efforts to prevent patient harm.
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 27, Issue 5
Reusable medical devices carry a special risk of infection if they aren't properly reprocessed and sterilized. This fact was clarified in recent months when scores of infection outbreaks and dozens of deaths were linked to defective endoscopes. Many of these outbreaks involved...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 27, Issue 5
Veteran accreditation professionals don't get too excited with the biannual release of The Joint Commission's list of most-cited standards because they know what's coming: safety, safety, and more safety.
Over the last decade, suicide rates in the United States have been creeping steadily skyward. In some states, the suicide rate is nearly twice the national average.
CMS recently clarified policy on acceptable control materials for lab testing. While not changing any of the standards, the agency explained some of the key points to §493.1256(c) of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) Interpretive Guidelines (IG).
The Joint Commission last week published a press release and an eight minute video defending its pain management standards after critics claimed they are fueling the opioid epidemic.
Since there aren’t any standards for determining the accuracy and timeliness of quality data, how do we know if today's quality measures are accurate? According to an opinion piece published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the answer is simple. We can't.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is attempting to develop better methods of measuring and reporting data on catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) and central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) rates.
This month, CMS plans to add a new “five-star” hospital rating system to its Hospital Compare website. The plan has come under fire, however, with many saying the rating system is too simplified to show true quality and puts too much emphasis on patient satisfaction.
