A last thing to consider when trying to make changes to improve discharge practices is to make certain that you put into place measures to inform the work you are doing. Strong discharge improvement plan needs outcome, process, and balancing measures. Some suggestions are below, but develop those that are meaningful to your patients as…
Author: RRHemphill
I am an emergency medicine physician by training, but have spent much of my career with a focus on trying to improve patient safety and quality of patient care. I have worked in government, military and large academic systems.
Safer Transitions: Improving communication and coordination during discharge
I have reviewed some of the issues related to poor discharge planning and how it can impact the outcomes of patients. Now I want to move on and discuss ways to improve discharge safety. Make no mistake, these things are easy to say and really hard to manage in the real world because they take…
Safer Transitions: Reducing Risks in Patient Discharge Planning
Healthcare has a lot of transitions. A lot. These can occur as a handoff…when information about what is going on with a patient is passed to another provider. If one doctor goes off shift, they transfer the care of the patient to another doctor. This can also be when a patient is admitted from the…
How Cyber Breaches Impact Patient Safety
Returning to Patient Safety Concerns Based on ECRI Top 10 Lists I wasn’t sure about bringing this ECRI topic up, but in some ways we should all be thinking about how to maintain security of our various online devices. The implications of breaches of your own computers can be devastating to you personally, but in…
Challenging Age Bias in Elderly Healthcare
The recent death of my father has left me trying to understand why it felt as though we were always fighting to get his physicians to more aggressively treat him. It is hard not to feel that even previously healthy older adults often face therapeutic nihilism, inadequate pain management, and premature discussions focused on the…
Understanding Medical Gaslighting: My Father’s Story
I have spent some time thinking over the things that went wrong with my father’s most recent engagement with the healthcare system. One that he ultimately did not survive. I wrote about some of my concerns previously, but I feel that I need to come back to this topic. If you would like to get…
How Do We Learn to Integrate AI Safely, Critically, and Effectively
I have been thinking about this for awhile. How physicians, and people in general, can approach decision making has been changing for some time. It started with the explosion of information, new studies, new drugs, and new technologies. Then came things like Google. The idea that with the huge influx of information, we could use…
When Expertise Doesn’t Matter
This is not really a patient safety (or quality) story today. But it is a story of about how we might stay safe when exposed to dilemmas that need good decisions. If you are making a decision about how to fix your car, I assume that most of you want someone with expertise to provide…
Health Care Should be Better
There is a video that I use in training. It is about a woman who suffers a terrible post-operative infection that almost kills her. It reminds us that even as we try and treat and cure people, they can be harmed by our system. What is difficult to believe is that I was looking for…
Health Care Should Help, Sometimes it Fails
My father did not survive his most recent interaction with the health care system. I am not young, so you might imagine that by dad was not either. If you look back in this blog, you will see that my father suffered a cardiac arrest after he had a hospital acquired urinary track infection that…
Communication In Healthcare
As my father continues to be in the hospital, it gives me the opportunity to live the things that happen to other families and patients. I think that many physicians believe that they understand what their patients go through. I imagine that many have real empathy for what patients go through. But there is nothing…
It Has Been About Two Years….
It has been just over two years since my father went to a nursing home after months in a hospital. He had fallen and broken his kneecap. He did well after his surgery but while in acute rehabilitation he developed a urinary track infection, likely because of a bladder catheter that was placed during his…
What Public Health Has Done for Us
Given all that is happening in the world of vaccines and other public health, I thought I would go a little off topic. I usually think of public health as a near cousin to patient safety. Both work to prevent harms to people. Sometimes I feel that both are underappreciated and things that we take…
Misdiagnosis in Healthcare
Over a year ago (time sure does fly), I was working through some of the 2024 ECRI top safety concerns (https://patientsafety.systems/wp-admin/post.php?post=1364&action=edit). Fair to say that I put off looking at the topic related to Misdiagnosis, because it is an enormously difficult topic to describe and understand, much less propose fixes. But, it’s time to jump…
Can AI Help Reduce Medical Errors?
I have to say that I am really fascinated with AI, both the promise and the peril. The news stories are coming fast and furious, sometimes with terrifying reports and other times bringing forward some amazing things that AI can help manage. It is easy to imagine the ways that AI could make the daily…