Insights from the Armstrong Institute
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,(...)
In May, three academic medical systems turned up the heat on a long-simmering debate about the link between surgical volumes and quality of care. Leaders from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the University of Michigan Health System and the Johns Hopkins Health System declared that their surgeons would need to meet annual volume thresholds for 10 high-risk(...)
Most of us would agree that there aren't enough valid and meaningful health care quality measures to guide patients' choices of hospitals and physicians. While the federal government has steadily expanded the number of publicly available measures on its Hospital Compare website, it still falls short of what many patients, payers and providers would like.(...)
How many of our conflicts could be handled better or averted if we had the opportunity to spend some time in the shoes of the person on "the other side"? When we experience a situation through another's eyes, and when we understand their work and world, true empathy, understanding and trust can emerge. This is(...)