Insights from the Armstrong Institute
For the second year in a row, The Johns Hopkins University will lead a free online course, The Science of Safety in Healthcare, which begins June 2 and continues for five weeks. If you have ever wanted an introduction to patient safety concepts—or have colleagues with interest—this five-week course is a great opportunity. Transforming our(...)
May 7, 2014 No comments
This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued two reports that are simultaneously scary and encouraging. First, the scary news: A national survey conducted in 2011 found that one in every 25 U.S. hospital patients experienced a healthcare-associated infection. That’s 648,000 patients with a combined 722,000 infections. About 75,000 of those patients(...)
Mar 28, 2014 3 comments
Frontline caregivers across the United States—and in many other countries, no doubt—are bombarded by multiple quality improvement (QI) projects. A clinical unit might simultaneously be engaged in efforts to reduce readmissions, eliminate hospital-acquired infections and other complications, increase hand-hygiene compliance, improve performance on core measures, and enhance the patient experience. The demands brought by participating(...)
Mar 11, 2014 3 comments
Despite spending $800 billion on technology last year, health care productivity is flat and preventable patient harm remains the third leading cause of death in the U.S. One reason is that health care is grossly under-engineered: medical devices don't talk to each other, treatments are not specified and ensured, and outcomes are largely assumed rather(...)
Dec 11, 2013 4 comments
Across health care, organizations constantly struggle with the challenge of achieving patient safety and quality successes on a large scale—across a hospital or network of hospitals. Too often, they are doomed at the start, because staff don’t even know what the goals are. In other cases, staff have limited capacity to carry out improvement work(...)
Nov 7, 2013 1 comment
Last week the Armstrong Institute, along with our partners at the World Health Organization, had the privilege of hosting more than 200 clinicians, patient advocates, health care leaders and policy makers for our inaugural Forum on Emerging Topics in Patient Safety in Baltimore. The event featured presentations by international experts in a dozen different industries,(...)
Oct 4, 2013 No comments
Where health care has fallen short in significantly improving quality, our peers in other high-risk industries have thrived. Perhaps we can adapt and learn from their lessons. For example, health care can learn much from the nuclear power industry, which has markedly improved its safety track record over the last two decades since peer-review programs were(...)
Sep 3, 2013 4 comments
At Johns Hopkins Medicine, we recently held our fourth annual Patient Safety Summit, a daylong gathering in which faculty and staff from across our health system share their work to reduce patient harm and foster a culture of safety. The event has quickly become a tradition, with more than 425 participants flocking annually to our(...)
Jul 1, 2013 6 comments
If you have ever tried to choose a physician or hospital based on publicly available performance measures, you may have felt overwhelmed and confused by what you found online. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Joint Commission, the Leapfrog Group, and the National Committee for Quality(...)
Jun 4, 2013 4 comments
If you follow the world of higher education, you have heard of MOOCs—massive online open courses. Open to anyone, anywhere, these free classes can attract tens of thousands of students whose hunger to learn outweighs the fact that no credits are typically awarded. With many elite universities now offering MOOCs, it’s a movement that is(...)
May 23, 2013 8 comments