Hospital Compliance Report

In 1918, the ACS began implementing their Hospital Standardization Program to inspect hospitals and enforce minimum standards. The initial inspection results were troubling, of 692 hospitals assessed, only 89 met the minimum standards (Chassin & O'Kane). Over the years, the program began to show significant improvement in the quality of care. By 1950, the Hospital Standardization Program accredited over 3,200 facilities across the country. Today, accreditation promotes a continuous cycle of quality improvement, rather than sustaining minimal levels of performance

Healthcare workers are not the only ones fearful of exposing medical errors. The medical institutes themselves operate behind a wall of silence. The IOM first recommended a national medical error reporting system in 1999 and despite attempts by then President Clinton, the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association successfully lobbied against it (Dyess, 2009). As of 2009, only 20 states have a mandatory medical error reporting system and only a fraction of estimated

In 2003, as an outcome of all the sentinel events reported to the Joint commission lead to the creation of the “The Universal protocol for preventing wrong site, wrong procedures, and wrong person surgery” (Mulloy & Hughes 2008). So, one of the ways that could have potentially prevented the situation from happening at the first place was implementing the universal protocol procedure. According to the protocol the conduction of proper pre as well as post-operating procedures are extremely mandatory. Therefore, by enforcing a standardized routine pre-operating procedure such as verifying the patient as well as the correct site for the procedure, by having the medical staff or preferably the physician marking the operating site with his or her initials before the surgery will be an effective preventive measure (Mulloy & Hughes 2008).

Keeping patients safe is essential in today’s health care system, but patient safety events that violate that safety are increasing each year. It was only recently, that the focus on patient safety was reinforced by a report prepared by Institute of medicine (IOM) entitled ” To err is human, building a safer health system”(Wakefield & Iliffe,2002).This report found that approx-imately 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur each year due to medical errors and that the majority was preventable. Deaths due to medical errors exceed deaths due to many other causes such as like HIV infections, breast cancer and even traffic accidents (Wakefield & Iliffe, 2002). After this IOM reports, President Clinton established quality interagency

As noted by Haugen, Murugesh, Haaverstad, Eide, and Softeland (2013) wrong site surgery continues to be a problem that can be prevented through the use of a checklist. In 2008, WHO published guidelines to ensure the safety of surgical patients. The guidelines included

With all of the possible problems that could occur during surgery, a wrong-site, wrong-patient mistake is one that should never arise. Nightingale Community Hospital (NCH) fully understands the importance of doing away with these errors and has set up protocol to work towards this goal. While the protocol is in place, it is not fully compliant with Joint Commission (JC) standards.

Lastly, in the surgery theatre, misidentification may happen due to the same factors formerly mention plus failure to mark site/side of surgery, failure to properly perform time-out, and multiple surgical teams (Chan et al., 2010). To analyze the risk for these errors, few factors will be analyzed including human factors (staffing, scheduling, supervision, and qualification), equipment and technology (scanners, computers, and software), Communication (between staff and patients, between staff, between staff and physician, between physician and patient, and between units), environmental factors (physical, safety, security, and preparedness), and procedures and policies (planning, staff education, patient education, protocols, patient identification, and patient observation) (Chan et al., 2010).

Each year medical errors cause more than 400,000 American deaths and at least 10-20 times that number experience serious harm. Researchers say that is equivalent to “three 747 airplanes crashing each day.” Medical errors rank as the third-leading cause of death in America. Therefore, patient safety is a national concern.

Two regulatory requirements, which support health-IT, are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and meaningful use. The first of these regulations is HIPAA. HIPAA has two sets of federal regulations that are applied to protect the privacy and security of health information they are the privacy rule and the security rule (Health IT legislation and Regulations, 2015, p. 35). These two regulations provide guidance for providers in how much access they have with patients’ privacy rights. The privacy rule restricts the release of Electronic Protected Health Information (e-PHI) without the patient’s knowledge or consent. The security rule requires covered entities to apply safeguards that protect the confidentiality, integrity,

It was my first time in the second floor OR and I was placed there alone. I went to found Ronny and told him that it is my first time in the OR. He told me that when I go into the OR I must always have a surgical bouffant on. We went to a room in the OR where he gave me a walkie-talkie, this always the front desk to contact me when there is a patient pick-up. He said that it must be on channel one at all times and that the volume should not be loud enough to disturb other that I can hear loud and clear. As I understood him a nurse for help called him for something. As I was waiting for a patient pick-up Ronnie was walking out of the OR telling me that he will be back as soon as possible. As soon as he left there was a call for a patient pick-up.

The U.S. lags behind in implementing ICD-10 coding because of other healthcare concerns within our healthcare system. I believe that with the passing of the Affordable Care Act and the changes that it brought about, the major focus for healthcare providers was how to survive and adjust to the changes. From a government stand point, the main focus was getting the Act passed and working out all of the bugs within the system used for consumers to sign up for insurance. Due to this ICD-10 was kind of tabled for a later date. This was good for those providers that had not begun to update their systems.

In 2008, it was estimated that “medical errors total more than $19.5 billion” (Andel, 2012, p. 12). It is important to address and solve this problem at this time because the National Quality Forums (NQF) “never events” considers such events. Never events are events that occur that should have never occurred in the first place. Reducing and eventually eliminating wrong site surgeries will help improve patient safety in the operating room and become a leading example in improving patient safety in all aspects of healthcare.

The divergence of goals and limited communication created a conflict between the physicians and the staff of hospital utilization review department. Although the physicians felt that the patient should remain hospitalized for some additional evaluation procedures, the decision taked by the utilization department was that the patient should be discharged because his condition did not rationalize continued admission. The physicians have the superior knowledge and the ability to take the right clinical decisions regarding the length of stay, while, the utilization review department serves as the oversight for approved length of stay and concerns the common clinical scenarios that lead to Medicare payment denials

Like others in New York, you may have, at one point or another, needed surgery to repair internal damage or treat a medical condition, among other reasons. When undergoing such procedures, you, and other patients, put your life and wellbeing in the hands of your medical provider. All too often, however, surgical errors occur that could be prevented.

Wrong site, wrong procedure, and wrong patient errors are avoidable safety issues. Nearly 1.9 trillion dollars are spent on medical errors each year in the United States (Catalano & Fickenscher, 2008). Between 1995 and 2007, 691 wrong-site surgeries have been reported to The Joint Commission's Sentinel Event data repository (AHC Media LLC, 2008). In 2003 in response to the outcry for better patient safety The Joint Commission