A new perspective on OR time-out
Sometimes it's all in a word. Struggling for compliance with the pause before surgery, a Michigan hospital tried changing the terminology, and that has made all the difference. Instead of "time-out," the new term is "patient safety briefing." Once the change was made, "we saw immediately that the focus changed,"…
What are your ASC's security gaps?
Laptops are stolen from a physician's office in a break-in, compromising data for hundreds of patients. An employee loses a personal hard drive that contains patient data. A radiologist joins a new outpatient facility and contacts patients from his previous employer, using information he downloaded before he left. Is your…
What's new in endoscopy guidelines?
Flexible endoscope reprocessing continues to be a major focus in infection prevention. All of the known cases of pathogen transmission during GI endoscopy have been traced to breaches in accepted cleaning and disinfection guidelines or other infection prevention practices. A revised Multisociety Guideline on Reprocessing Flexible GI Endoscopes, released in…
Time to tone it down: Strategies for managing noise, distractions
"Our society has become a lot louder, and we tolerate a lot more noise," says Verna Gibbs, MD, director of NoThing Left Behind and professor of clinical surgery, University of California, San Francisco. That includes the OR, where phones, overhead pages, alarms, suction, ventilation equipment, medical devices such as drills,…
Simple cotton swab lowers postop SSIs
Gently probing a wound with a dry cotton swab after surgery for a perforated appendix dramatically reduced infections in a study. Only 3% of patients who had the daily probing got surgical site infections (SSIs) compared with 19% in the control group who did not. Though the exact mechanism isn't…
Rapid methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) screening in infection control programs
Editor's note AUGUST 2011 OR leaders are striving to make evidence-based decisions about new technology. OR Manager, Inc., and ECRI Institute have joined in a collaboration to bring quarterly supplements with summaries of the Institute's Emerging Technology Evidence Reports to OR Manager readers. ECRI Institute is an independent nonprofit organization…
Quandary: What to do for vaginal prep
It's a question ORs have faced for several years—what do you use for the vaginal prep when the patient is allergic to povidone iodine? After Techni-Care (PCMX, or chloroxylenol) stopped being made in 2009, clinicians were left without a skin prep indicated for use in the genital area for iodineallergic…
Pinpointing risks of wrong surgery
Do you know where your OR's process is at most risk for an error that could lead to wrong-site surgery? A South Carolina health system identified its improvement opportunities and came up with solutions as part of a national project with the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare (CTH). Five…
Free Daily News
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- CSA taps Milagro’s AI coding to accelerate revenue cycle across ASC network
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