Insights from the Armstrong Institute
Selecting the right hospital to receive care can save your life, lower your risks of getting a complication, or even reduce your financial hardship. The problem is that it's extremely hard for patients to make that judgment. Sometimes, the data they need to select the best hospital for their care doesn't exist. In other cases(...)
Talking to health care professionals about the importance of loving your patients and colleagues — as I often do — might raise eyebrows. How can we be expected to love our patients during a 15-minute clinic visit? How can love form among hospital teams coming together for a surgical procedure but then moving on to other work?(...)
Wanted: Talented, highly driven individuals to take on multiyear work assignment with potential for benefiting humankind. Requires the highest levels of technical skill, teamwork and adaptability. Must be able to tolerate social isolation, mental and physical fatigue, demanding and uneven work schedules, days and nights away from home. Risk of depression and burnout. Must be(...)
Fifteen-year anniversaries often come and go without fuss, overlooked in favor of those we can mark in full decades. Yet recently, at Johns Hopkins and nationally, we've crossed that mark for a couple of events in patient safety that merit both celebration and reflection. In January 2001, a series of lapses at Johns Hopkins led(...)
Would my white lab coat be better put to use when I carve the Christmas roast than when seeing patients? After all, we know that these coats can be covered with pathogens, including drug-resistant ones, which may be transmitted to patients. They are cleaned infrequently: In a survey of physicians, nearly 58 percent said they(...)
In my role as the patient safety innovation coordinator for the Armstrong Institute, I spend a lot of time helping clinicians improve processes in health care delivery. Oftentimes I've found that when faced with a challenge we all have a tendency to go right to solutions we're comfortable with. Especially in health care, we’re used(...)
Maybe you've had this experience: You attend a workshop or conference to build your skill set, you pick up new strategies and tools, and you leave energized and excited to put them to use in your hospital or clinic. Yet when you return to work, you find it hard to get the ball rolling. Colleagues(...)
Like a pro golfer swears by a certain brand of clubs or a marathon runner has a chosen make of shoes, surgeons can form strong loyalties to the tools of their craft. Preferences for these items — such as artificial hips and knees, surgical screws, stents, pacemakers and other implants — develop over time, perhaps out of habit(...)
In this post, I present the case that U.S. News & World Report’s patient safety score, a component of its annual Best Hospitals rankings, has a bias against Maryland hospitals. Two editors at U.S. News respond to my position at the bottom of the post. Hospitals can get overwhelmed by the array of ratings, rankings(...)
Since undergoing a double-lung transplant at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in December 2011, Podge Reed Jr. has had four medical admissions, two surgical admissions, eight outpatient procedures requiring anesthesia, more than 100 outpatient appointments, and 700 labs and other tests. He's amassed enough experiences with the health care system to write a book. So far,(...)