Mention to a group of physicians that patients should have ready access to their medical notes, and you will likely hear a gasp (or two). Physicians have traditionally resisted the idea of sharing medical notes with patients, but as patients clamor to be in control of their own health and payers...
Better Times Hospital is in crisis. The medical staff is deeply rooted in a departmental structure that relies heavily on committees, and few physicians want to serve on them. Joe, the medical staff president, has just finished reading Leading Change by John Kotter and has...
According to a recent Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, Hospital Incident Reporting Systems Do Not Capture Most Patient Harm (http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-00091.pdf), hospital reporting systems aren’t...
Back in 2007, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement created the Triple Aim, which challenges organizations to provide better patient care, achieve population health, and lower costs. Since then, several areas have been identified as barriers to achieving the Triple Aim. First on that list is...
If you took on a new job, you’d expect your employer to tell you what your duties entailed, what time to show up, and how “good performance” is defined within your role. For physicians, that doesn’t always happen. They often arrive on their first day at a hospital with no rules or expectations...
As anyone who works in an ED knows, long wait times are not an ED-specific issue. Most of the time, long wait times in the ED aren't due to the numbers of patients being seen in the ED, but rather to the patients who have been admitted to the hospital through the ED and are waiting for a bed to...
