According to American College of Medical Quality (2010), risk management involves identifying conditions that might put patients or a healthcare organization at the danger of undesirable outcome. In addition, the practice involves putting in place measures of avoiding, preventing, and controlling the risks. Quality management in healthcare organization is useful in managing, reducing, and alleviating risks. Risk management is an essential component of making sure that patients are safe, and that the care they get does not endanger their health or wellbeing. Process improvement is a quality management concept that involves the identification of weak areas in order to come up with ways to improve processes at the medical facility.
Factors Associated with Hand Hygiene Compliance at a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, 34(11), 1146. doi:10.1086/673465 | Background Information | The stated purpose of the article was to identify factors associated with hand hygiene conformity. As stated by Kowitt (2013) hand hygiene is considered the most important measure in preventing hospital-acquired infections which in 2004 related to about 99,000 deaths, affecting 1.7 million patients with a cost of $6.5 billion to the healthcare system. In the abstract, it is stated that these factors were tracked over four years and involved over 161,526 observations of hand hygiene compliance. This initiative was to see if factors are reliable in increasing compliance rates among all categories of hospital workers.
Noncompliance, due to the several steps and time pressure, and variation in the manual method is believed to be at fault. It was decided to trial the use of SwabKit® in early 2010 on the critical care units, medical-surgical units, and step down units. They used the caps on central venous catheters (CVCs), peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs), and peripheral intravenous (PIVs). The trial was successful, so they decided to implement use of the kits hospital wide in July 2011. After a two month adjustment period, the hospital began to record data on the use of SwabKit®.
While studying the surgical patient tracer worksheet, one of the most serious deficiencies identified was the patient history and physical not being done within twenty-four hours of admission. In fact, the patient medical records were completed after more than seventy-two hours of patient admission. Documenting medical records in an appropriate time frame is an important standard in the joint commission accreditation process. The Joint Commission requires an accredited hospital to have written policies regarding timely documentation into medical records. Eighty percent of a patient’s diagnosis is done by the identification of their current and past medical histories.
The professionals and physicians are trained and have experience with high volume emergency trauma within a twelve-year and more spans. Most medical situation such as fractures, infections, and lacerations can be done before referral to a major hospital. The services provided are in-house laboratory, ECGs scan, X-ray scans, and airway equipments. The eligibility requirements are basically to have the proper insurance available; in which most major private insurances and Medicare are accepted. Because the Pearland Health Center is a business of urgent care; referral are not necessary.
Errors and Compliance in Coding The cost of health care is sky rocketing over the recent years. One of the reasons for this is because of medical billing errors. One-third of medical billings have errors in them. (National Public Radio, 2006) This is why it is important for patients to look over their bills very closely and not hesitate to ask questions to the health care facility and your insurance provider. These errors are not always easily discovered.
Long before the rise of big data, Purdue was compiling profiles of doctors and their prescribing habits into databases. These databases then organized the information based on location to indicate the spectrum of prescribing patterns in a given state or county. The idea was to pinpoint the doctors prescribing the most pain medication and target them for the company's marketing onslaught. That the databases couldn't distinguish between doctors who were prescribing more pain meds because they were seeing more patients with chronic pain or were simply looser with their signatures didn't matter to Purdue. The Los Angeles Times reported that by 2002 Purdue Pharma had identified hundreds of doctors who were prescribing OxyContin recklessly, yet they did little about it.
CQC’s aim is to promote improvements in care, and safeguard by making sure a high quality of care is provided and will take legal action if care providers do not met standards, or if they believe service users are at risk. Social workers assess the needs of individuals, and have access to different services of support and protection. They working together with other services such as doctors, community nurses, occupational therapists ensure that they are getting the care and support needed to live happily and have a good quality of life Police investigate any allegations of abuse and will arrange support and protection for the individual, they take action against abuse for example they will gather any evidence to build a case so the abuser can be prosecuted. Medical professionals such as Doctors, Nurses can examine the individuals for any marks/bruising and treat and medical problems as well as collecting medical evidence and being an expert
Reid shows that other countries has a lot better health system than does the USA and we could learn from them. Reid believes that we can decrease costs and improve access to care if we used a different health care system. One of the main reasons that Reid dislikes the American Health Care system is because the system does not provide health care to everybody in the country. “The cohort of Americans who don’t have health insurance on any given day numbers over 45 million (about 15 percent of the population)”(Reid Ch. 3).
The significant difference between the rates of health insurance cost increases and wage and inflation increases creates a problem in itself. Not only are there millions of people without health insurance, it is becoming more likely that they will not be able to afford to hold insurance policy. However, in a 2002 study it was found that only 30% of the uninsured were below federal poverty levels (Overview of the U.S. Health Care System). This means that despite the unsettling amounts of people in poverty without health insurance, there is also the issue of those who have the means to provide themselves and their families with health insurance and choose not to, only to be faced with crippling health bills should anything go wrong. Navigating and deciphering the complicated health insurance industry is too daunting and expensive a task to leave up to individuals, which is why in many cases, the United States government and private organizations have stepped in.