Safety First

19 pulmonary, critical-care measures endorsed

The National Quality Forum endorsed three new and 16 existing quality measures related to pulmonary conditions and the critical-care setting. Learn more from Modern Healthcare here.

CDC Links Injection Practices to Hospitalizations

Despite aggressive federal campaigns to educate providers about proper needle and syringe use practices, incidents in two states involving 10 patients required hospitalization for treatment of invasive bacterial infections because clinics injected multiple patients with fluids from single-dose vials.

The report was published in the according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Learn more here.

NQF endorses complications-related measures

The National Quality Forum has endorsed 14 patient-safety measures related to complications such as wrong-site surgery, medication errors, patient burns and postoperative pulmonary embolism. Read the full story from Maureen McKinney in Modern Healthcare here.

New Podcast Series About the AHRQ Quality Indicators Toolkit for Hospitals

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is releasing a series of seven audio interviews focused on the use of quality improvement tools in the AHRQ Quality IndicatorsTM Toolkit for Hospitals. The toolkit is a free resource to guide hospitals through the process of using the AHRQ Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs) and Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) to improve care.

The first interview in this series features Donna Farley, adjunct senior health policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, speaking about how hospital teams can adapt and use the toolkit to support their quality improvement initiative.

Download Getting Started with the AHRQ QI Toolkit here. (Audio file and transcript are available.)

NQF endorses 28 quality measures

The National Quality Forum has endorsed 28 measures, nine related to surgical care and 19 related to prevention and screening. Read more from Maureen McKinney in Modern Healthcare here.

NQF OKs unplanned-readmissions measures

Continuing the trend of targeting preventable hospitalizations, the National Quality Forum endorsed two measures related to all-cause unplanned readmissions. Learn more from Modern Healthcare here.

AHRQ issues 2011 health care quality and disparities reports

Health care quality is improving faster than access to care and disparities in care, according to the 2011 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports, released April 20 by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The reports look at about 250 measures of health care quality, access and efficiency from a variety of national sources.

Between 2002 and 2008, 77% of quality measures related to treatment of acute illness or injury showed improvement, compared with about half of measures related to preventive care and chronic disease management, the reports indicate. At the same time, 50% of the measures that tracked disparities in health care access showed no improvement, while 40% were getting worse.

Specifically, Latinos, American Indians and Alaska Natives experienced worse access to care than whites on more than 60% of the access measures, while African Americans experienced worse access on slightly more than 30% of the access measures.

[ via AHA News Now ]

Helicopter transport to trauma centers associated with improved survival

Adults with serious injuries are more likely to survive if transported to a level I or II trauma center by helicopter than by ground transport, according to a study published April 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Helicopter transport was associated with a 16% better chance of survival, based on data from more than 200,000 patients in the 2007-2009 versions of the American College of Surgeons National Trauma Data Bank.

The measured outcomes included survival to hospital discharge and discharge disposition. "Future studies should focus on efficient and user-friendly pre-hospital assessment tools to properly identify injured adults who will be the most likely to benefit from helicopter transport," the authors said.

The JAMA issue focuses on comparative effectiveness research.

[ via AHA News Now ]

Project targets surgical-site infections

The American College of Surgeons and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have teamed up on a three-year project that will use health information technology, standardized quality measures and other tools to more effectively target surgical-site infections and related complications. Read more from Modern Physician here.

NQF endorses 30 care measures

The National Quality Forum has endorsed 30 measures covering three areas: perinatal care, renal care and resource use. Read more from Modern Healthcare here.