Editor's Note The Joint Commission announced on May 3 that accreditation programs for ambulatory care (85 fewer), behavioral healthcare (63 fewer), critical access hospitals (143 fewer), home care (65 fewer), laboratories (50 fewer), nursing care centers (59 fewer), and office-based surgery practices (50 fewer) will see fewer elements of performance…

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Editor's Note Air particle counts (APCs) in the OR increase in relation to traffic and door openings, this study finds. Over 1 week, researchers recorded APCs in 5-minute intervals and movement of healthcare workers in the OR. Trained observers recorded information about traffic, door openings, job title of the opener,…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission announced April 26 that Select Medical, based in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is the first recipient of its Physician Leader Forum Challenge Award. The award recognizes Select Medical’s leading practice for wound care and prevention of pressure ulcers in patients throughout the system. An improvement project lowered…

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Editor's Note In this study, data show that Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals have a similar or more favorable quality compared with non-VA hospitals. Data for 129 VA and 4,010 non-VA hospitals were evaluated on 17 outcome measures (9 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Patient Safety Indicators [PSIs], 4 mortality…

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Healthcare lags behind other industries when it comes to innovation. That’s partly because new treatments must be vetted for safety and efficacy, and partly because fee-for-service reimbursement sparked little incentive for creativity and efficiency. Under value-based purchasing, OR leaders have more opportunity to be innovative, but first they must understand…

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One of the biggest challenges for OR managers is efficient use of OR blocks. OR managers struggle to balance revenue and utilization targets with surgeon and staff preferences. The result is underutilized OR time, unnecessary costs, and dissatisfied staff. “Let’s face it, our block allocation process isn’t very efficient,” says…

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Major changes at a facility such as reorganizing service lines or adding new ORs can be highly disruptive, cutting into productivity and potentially loss of revenue. What can OR managers do to avoid this situation? At Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, OR leaders were facing several simultaneous challenges: planning…

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Editor's Note A study of 14 South Carolina hospitals found the use of a 19-item surgical checklist developed by the World Health Organization resulted in a 22% decrease in postoperative mortality over 3 years, compared with hospitals not participating in the checklist program. In the 14 participating hospitals, mortality was…

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Editor's Note This study validates a methodology, using the Veterans Affairs Surgical Quality Improvement Program (VASQIP) risk calculator, to identify patients with a high risk of 30-day mortality after elective surgery who may benefit from referral for tertiary care. The methodology predicted that 16% (90 of 565) of patients would…

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Editor's Note Hospital surgical readmissions are primarily explained by patient- and procedure-specific factors and less by broader specialty and hospital effects, this study finds. There was no correlation between specialty-specific readmissions for general and orthopedic, general and vascular, and vascular and orthopedic procedures. Within specialties, there were modest correlations between…

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