Voices for Safer Care

Insights from the Armstrong Institute

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More Science, Less Sausage-Making Needed for Hospital Quality Measures

If you understand statistics and possess the intestinal fortitude to examine a ranking methodology, you will recognize that it involves ingredients that have to be recombined, repackaged and renamed. It's messy, like sausage-making. This is not to say that the end product — hospital rankings — are distasteful. Patients deserve valid, transparent and timely information […]

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Potential Bias in U.S. News Patient Safety Scores

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 […]

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Why Health Care Performance Measures Need Their Own Grades

Some measures of health care quality and patient safety should be taken with a grain of salt. A few need a spoonful. In April, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers published an article examining how well a state of Maryland pay-for-performance program measure for dangerous blood clots identified cases that were potentially preventable. In reviewing […]

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About the Armstrong Institute Blog

Voices for Safer Care serves as a forum for health care professionals, patients and others who are committed to ending preventable harm, improving patients’ outcomes and experiences, and reducing waste in health care. The “voices” are those of the buy modafinil clinicians, researchers and staff experts of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, as well as anyone who joins the dialogue.

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Recent Posts

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  • Radiology’s Quality Improvement Committee: A Formula for Success
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Categories

  • Designing Safer Systems
  • Measurement of Safety and Quality
  • Organizational and Cultural Change
  • Patient-Centered Care
  • Preventing Patient Harm