Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare

By Dr. Srinivasarao Badugu, MD, Pediatric Cardiologist, Driscoll Children’s Hospital As a pediatric cardiologist in South Texas, I’ve witnessed a profound shift in the health landscape of our youngest generation. What used to be a concern for adults is now an alarming reality for children, some as young as eight or nine years old.

Patient safety leaders struggle with an impossible bottleneck: underreporting combined with an inability to triage what gets reported. Reporting barriers, inconsistent definitions, and manual review processes that can’t scale mean serious harm often goes uninvestigated; corrective actions lack validation, and dangerous patterns remain invisible.

By Chris Cheney Samuel Acquah, MD, who became the new vice president and CMO of Northwell Health‘s Phelps Hospital in July, has extensive experience in critical care innovation. Acquah’s prior leadership experience includes serving as section chief of medical critical care at Mount Sinai Health System. The keys to success in critical care innovation include choosing innovations that have been shown to improve patient outcomes and to improve operational excellence, according to Acquah.

By Chris Cheney Houston Methodist has adopted an AI scribe for more than 20 specialties, including orthopedic surgery, cardiology, and primary care. AI scribes use AI-enabled technology to capture the interactions of clinicians and patients and to generate clinical documentation, and recent evidence suggests that AI scribes yield significant value for clinicians.

By Gabrielle Genovesi, MPH The difference between life and death in hospital ICUs may come down to who is present to provide care. Research shows a 30% reduction in overall hospital mortality and a 40% reduction in ICU mortality in ICUs where intensivists, who are board-certified physicians with additional certification in the subspecialty of critical care medicine, manage or co-manage all patients.

“We looked at the nursing career ladder and said, ‘We can implement this at all of our sites, but why don’t we also just standardize everything, ensure that all of our nursing support staff have similar opportunities, and level the playing field and make sure that everybody can have similar opportunities here?'” Welsh said. The program is a three-tiered system where each tier builds off the previous one.

“In most cases, you need to get many caregivers involved, including physical therapy, occupational therapy, doctors, nurses, and social services staff to meet the patient’s needs,” Fockler says. For hospitalized patients, rehabilitation should begin during a hospital stay, Fockler explains. “You need to start rehabilitation in the hospital and make rehabilitation part of discharge planning,” Fockler says.

Hand hygiene data can reveal far more than compliance rates. This white paper explores six ways health systems can use objective, time-stamped insights to improve workflows, strengthen reporting, accelerate contact tracing, mitigate risk, optimize staffing, and enhance patient safety. Learn how greater visibility care into delivery can help quality and safety leaders make faster, more informed decisions across the organization.

By Amanda Norris For two decades, hospitals have been rewarded for reporting, documenting, and scoring well on quality measures. Now many CMOs are asking a more uncomfortable question: Are today’s quality programs improving care or simply creating more work around it? I’ve covered enough healthcare transformation stories to know that measurement usually sounds like progress.

By G Hatfield Workplace violence in healthcare is a Rubik’s Cube with several different starting points. It’s a complex, multilayered issue that stems from high-stress work environments, higher patient acuity, and a number of sociological phenomena that all result in a very complex puzzle that’s difficult to understand and solve.