Q: Many hospital leaders struggle with how seriously to take anonymous reports, especially when the facts cannot be immediately verified. From a compliance standpoint, how should healthcare organizations balance verification with the need to identify potential hazards early?
Most physician offices don’t store or use large quantities of controlled substances, but even if controlled substances are used infrequently, there is always a risk of theft. Assessing processes in physician offices will make certain that diversion risk is minimized.
Failure to identify or interrupt contact transmissions, droplet transmissions, airborne transmissions, environmental spread, and transport-related exposure can lead to hospital-associated infections, illness among staff members, delayed treatment, and operational disruption.
Fire systems, access control, video surveillance, and alarm infrastructure are often installed by different vendors, overseen by different teams, and updated on different timelines. As a result, critical systems do not share context when incidents occur.
Q: How should quality and accreditation leaders partner with IT and clinical leadership so that artificial intelligence (AI) supports compliance instead of creating new blind spots?
Despite the lack of uniform standards, common MRI-related injuries such as projectile incidents and radiofrequency burns are well understood and often highly preventable.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is proposing a $103,265 fee on H-1B petitions subject to the annual visa cap, marking the Trump administration’s second attempt to significantly increase the cost of employing foreign specialized workers in the U.S.
In this guest column, Dan Scungio, MT(ASCP), SLS, laboratory safety officer for multihospital system Sentara Healthcare in Virginia, and otherwise known as “Dan, the Lab Safety Man,” discusses OSHA’s position on formaldehyde exposure monitoring.
Internal audits are a cornerstone of accreditation readiness, but in litigation, they demonstrate whether an organization actively identified and addressed risk before harm occurred.
Drug diversion is a pervasive problem across healthcare. Along with sound processes for prevention and detection, all organizations must have a dedicated response team to examine suspicious findings and determine appropriate next steps.
