LSHSL: Residents' Subject Guide: Quality Improvement

Journals

The Library provides acess to many safety and quality journals. Below are some examples:

American Journal of Infection Control

Drug, Healthcare and Patient Safety

Healthcare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement

Hospital Infection Control

Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology

Journal of Patient Safety and Quality Improvement

Lippincott's Case Management: Managing the Process of Patient Care

Medical Letter of Drugs and Therapeutics

Patient Safety in Surgery

Professional Case Management

Quality Management in Health Care

Books

Assessing Patient Safety Practices and Outcomes in the U. S. Health Care System by Donna Farley Presents the results of a two-year study that analyzes how patient safety practices are being adopted by U.S. health care providers, examines hospital experiences with a patient safety culture survey, and assesses patient safety outcomes trends. In case studies of four U.S. communities, researchers collected information on the dynamics of local patient safety activities and on adoption of safe practices by hospitals.
Best Care at Lower Cost by Mark Smith (Editor); Institute of Medicine (U.S.) America's health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Best Care at Lower Cost explains that inefficiencies, an overwhelming amount of data, and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness. According to this report, the knowledge and tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve continuous improvement and better quality care at a lower cost. The costs of the system's current inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation. About 30 percent of health spending in 2009--roughly $750 billion--was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state. This report states that the way health care providers currently train, practice, and learn new information cannot keep pace with the flood of research discoveries and technological advances. About 75 million Americans have more than one chronic condition, requiring coordination among multiple specialists and therapies, which can increase the potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, potentially conflicting interventions, and dangerous drug interactions. Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that a better use of data is a critical element of a continuously improving health system, such as mobile technologies and electronic health records that offer significant potential to capture and share health data better. In order for this to occur, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, IT developers, and standard-setting organizations should ensure that these systems are robust and interoperable. Clinicians and care organizations should fully adopt these technologies, and patients should be encouraged to use tools, such as personal health information portals, to actively engage in their care. This book is a call to action that will guide health care providers; administrators; caregivers; policy makers; health professionals; federal, state, and local government agencies; private and public health organizations; and educational institutions.
Outcome Measures for Effective Teamwork in Inpatient Care by Melony E. Sorbero The Department of Defense (DoD) has been one of the leaders in actions to improve teamwork, which it has pursued with the goal of achieving safer care and reducing adverse events for patients served by its military hospitals. DoD and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) have worked together to develop tools to improve teamwork in delivering care in order to achieve safer outcomes for patients. In 2004, AHRQ modified its Patient Safety Evaluation Center contract with RAND to add an analytic study to identify and test measures that have the potential to capture improvements in teamwork practices.This report presents the final results from the teamwork outcome measures study. Study components discussed in the report include the methods used for selecting and testing candidate measures, findings from a literature search that informed the measure-selection process, the measures identified by clinical experts as representing teamwork-sensitive outcomes, and results of the testing of a subset of these measures on the administrative data of the DoD health system. The three clinical areas for which measures were identified are labor and delivery, surgery, and treatment for acute myocardial infarction. Many of the outcome measures identified in this study and all of the process measures require information that is not available in administrative data but that is available in medical charts.The contents of this report will be of interest to national and state policymakers, health care organizations and clinical practitioners, and health researchers who are engaged in activities to improve the quality and safety of health care and assess the effects of those improvements on care process and patient outcomes.
Patient Safety - a Psychological Perspective by Hannes Zacher This book takes a psychological perspective on patient safety. Theoretical and empirical research on safety-related experiences and behaviors in clinical settings is reviewed. Individual, team, and organizational factors that, by themselves and in combination, facilitate or impede patient safety are considered, including knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality as well as higher-order factors such as safety culture and climate.

Howard QI Publications

Ayetunji TA, Turner PL, Onguti SK, Ehanire ID, Dorsett FO, Fullum TM, Cornwell EE 3rd, Haider AH (2013), Predictors of postdischarge complications: role of in-hospital length of stay, American Journal of Surgery, 205(1), 71-6.