Creating a Flow Chart: Bradycardia
Today’s healthcare environment is facing tremendous challenges in order to ensure safe, quality care, while simultaneously providing affordable care that is still able to produce revenue. With continuously escalating healthcare demands emerging from the population, healthcare providers and professionals have no choice but to accept these challenges and put forth the best possible approach to meet these demands involving patient care. New ideas for managing tests, medications, procedures, orders and delivery of care must continuously be considered by the healthcare organizations to ensure that the care they provide is appropriate, safe, efficient and cost effective. Periodically providers run into trouble
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Bradycardia Workflow Process
Sinus bradycardia is defined as a heart rate of less than 60bpm in conjunction with normal sinus rhythm. A bradyarrhythmia, on the other hand has a disturbance in cardiac conduction with rate of less then 60bpm (Swift, 2013). Intrinsic and extrinsic etiologies contribute to bradycardia. Intrinsic causes relate to abnormalities in the conduction system, where extrinsic causes include: increase vagal tone, electrolyte imbalance, hypoxia, hypothermia and hypothyroidism (Swift, 2013).
Patients with acute unstable bradycardia may present various signs and symptoms, including fatigue, dizziness, exercise intolerance, syncope, and congestive heart failure. Treatments for the patients with bradycardia are determined by the patient’s overall condition and existing co-morbidities. In cases where the heart rate drops to a rate of 30-40bpm the patient may not tolerate this situation due to reduced cardiac output, decreased myocardial function which will lead to poor perfusion to vital organs (Swift, 2013). In severe cases, bradycardia may lead to asystole, which is why early recognition and treatment of the acute bradycardia is paramount to achieving a good outcome for the patient.
In order to help recognize and treat this condition our organization has created and enforced a workflow chart to assist medical personal to implement the process in
Over the past decade, government operated and privately owned health care organizations have made improvements identifying patient disabilities, discovering alternative treatments at the patient’s discretion, identifying the cause of diseases, and discovering lifesaving cures. The current United States health care delivery system has undergone enormous changes throughout the years. People the United States utilize health care services for many reasons: to prevent disease, to prevent future illnesses, to eliminate pain, and promote a healthier lifestyle to patients. The Patient Protection and
Tachycardia: Tachycardia typically refers to a heart rate that exceeds the normal range for a resting heart rate. When the heart beats rapidly, the heart pumps less efficiently and provides less blood flow to the body and the heart. The rapid heartbeat increases the workload and oxygen demand of the heart. Problems will occur with the heart as tachycardia persists over time. The heart is maintaining less oxygen, which will lead to an MI due to death of the myocardial cells. Patient will start to have angina because of this. Tachycardia is noted in many diseases and disorder like: fever endocarditis, anemia, HTN, pericarditis, abnormal heart impulses, anxiety, older age, sleep apnea, COPD, electrolyte imbalances, and many more.
Many healthcare organizations set goals and objections and write mission statements that reflect the way they want the public to see how healthcare is provided. This is done to guide how their healthcare providers practice daily. In order to meet these goals and objects it is necessary to have in place processes and procedures to ensure the results will be what is expected which is a positive patient experience and outcome. In order for our organization to reach this goal there is a coaching and execution package that will provide step-by-step processes and procedures to ensure that everyone is doing the same thing at the same time
Healthcare is ever changing and anyone in the healthcare profession needs to stay up to date with the evolving technologies. The goal of most healthcare facilities is to keep patients safe, provide excellent care and keep the facilities profitable all at the same time. Organizations such as The Joint Commission have been established to ensure this happens. The Joint Commission’s mission statement is “All people always experience the safest, highest quality, best-value health care across all settings.” (Joint Commission, 2014). With the new technologies surfacing, groups are needed to ensure patient safety and monitor patient care. The demand on healthcare is growing as well as patient expectations.
The policy is a very realistic approach to solve this problem because as more individuals are insured under the ACA and have access to healthcare, they will utilize health facilities and hospitals more frequently for services or procedures and hospitals will have increased occurrences of adverse outcomes, if this is not addressed. Patients are the consumers. They seek satisfaction and quality with services. Quality health care and patient safety should be important to the patients, hospitals, health facilities, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, risk managers, and medical professionals and staff. Medical staff may feel over burdened to comply with the necessary steps to ensure the improvement of patient safety, which may require additional training.
The multidisciplinary team meeting is an example of the process in action. Many clinicians are present. Most will be in a position to help formulate the most appropriate management for the patient. The doctor directly responsible presents the present situation and the relevant background. The assessment will include a discussion with the clinician to clarify the clinical findings and a joint review of the results of all relevant investigations. Recommendations will be agreed by all present. These will be documented in the patient's records for implementation.
Beta-blockers have been recently reported to decrease mortality in heart failure patients. Mortality and hospitalization rates for patients with the disease are high and continue to rise. Despite the magnitude of the problem, treatment of congestive heart failure is often inadequate. Primary care physicians care for most patients with heart failure. Beta-blocker therapy is appropriate in patients with NYHA class II or class III symptoms resulting from left ventricular systolic dysfunction. Unless contraindicated, beta-blockers should be considered a mainstay of therapy in these patients to improve symptoms and mortality and to decrease hospitalizations. Beta-blockers should not be administered to patients with heart failure who have bradycardia, heart block or hemodynamic instability.
Within the Electronic Health Record program, the nurse has access to evidence-based practice tools that can assist the nurse in making decisions regarding the patients plan of care (Linder, J., Bates, D., Middleton, B., & Stanfford, R., 2007). The most important feature of the Electronic Health Record is the ability to instantly provide real-time patient-centered data to all authorized providers (HIT, 2013). The Electronic Health Record is real-time, providing nurses with the most up to the moment patient information the significance of this feature can be explained in the following example. For example, if a patient is in surgery, the patient's health record is available to the circulating nurse in the Operating Room, the Post Anesthesia Care Unit nurse and can be shared with the unit staff nurse the patient will be transferred to after recovering in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit. This is of particular importance because having access to the patient's chart, allows the nurses at each phase on the patient's care the ability to prepare supplies, gather necessary equipment and arrange for supplementary staff. Evidence-based practice suggests appropriate planning is a key factor in promoting positive, cost efficient patient outcomes (Anderson, 2012). In the profession of nursing when time is of the essence, and time loss can mean loss of a life, this is a feature that is very
The changes in healthcare over the last several years have been dramatic. All parties, providers, insurers, and the Federal Government are looking for ways to reduce cost and increase quality. The report by the Institute for Medicine in 1999, “To Err is Human” spurred increasing scrutiny in medical care to improve quality at same and looking for ways to reduce risk to patients and increase safety. Discussion of solutions
Since our clinical experience was in the simulation lab, I do not have any background information about my patient. My first time having experience with a bradycardic patient was actually last week during clinicals. He had a heart rate that was consistently in the 40s and he had a pacemaker inserted that day. Risk factors of bradycardia that are modifiable lifestyle changes include smoking, using recreational drugs, alcohol use, high blood pressure and stress. A few complications of untreated bradycardia include inability to pump enough blood throughout the body, frequent fainting spells or even cardiac arrest.
The authors in this article discuss about how hospitals have been trying to cut back on costs while simultaneously attempting to provide high quality patient care. It is mentioned that approximately 200,000 Americans die yearly from preventable medical errors. It is up to the healthcare professionals to provide the best care possible for their patients.
Modern health care is highly complex and precarious with the use of modern technology.1 These indirectly increase the chances of getting error in delivering care to the patient and may result in adverse event.1 In United State (U.S) health care errors are the leading cause of death and injury.2 Therefore, safe practice in medical setting should not be addressed lightly and a serious act should be taken in addressing this issues. Most of this error can be prevented and avoided. One of the best practices that have been implemented in the medical field is safe practice. Safe practice covers many aspects in health care including history taking, treatment such as pharmacological interactions and implications, drug recommendation and accurate
On average, the guides took 27 minutes to complete. As the results indicate, Hospital A has not implemented some of the recommended practices in the following guides: Computerized Provider Order Entry with Decision Support, Patient Identification, and Test Result Reporting. The total number of these practices are 16 which accounts for 10% of the total recommended practices. Also, there is a number of practices that has been implemented partially in some areas in hospital A. These practices fall into the following guides: Computerized Provider Order Entry with Decision Support, Clinician Communication, High Priority Practice, Organizational Responsibilities, and system interfaces which account for 11% of the total recommended practices. The only guides that hospital A is fully complied with are Contingency Planning and System Configuration guides. The total number of practices that have been fully implemented across all guides is 125 which represent 79% of the total recommended practices.
The physician practice workflow has changed drastically since the implementation of the EHR. The workflow has become more efficient and well organized. Many routine tasks of a practice such as scheduling appointments, registering new and established patients, verifying insurance managing messages and telephone calls, check in and check out of patients, conducting exams, renewing medications, documenting illness histories, recording vital signs, and much more have improved by EHR implementation. For instance, before EHR the front office assistant checks in patient whereas the EHR allows the patient to check in using a self-service computer in the lobby. The other example is before implementation of HER, the front office assistant files chart in medical records filing cabinet and after implementation of HER, this step completely is skipped. The implementation of HER has made the workflow more rapid
In relation to this, it can be mentioned that in the contemporary era healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals are usually facing varied new as well as evolving challenges in terms of healthcare requirements, evolving diseases, ageing population related discrepancies and management related issues among others (Beelitz 2015). At the same time, it can be mentioned that healthcare organizations are also witnessing varied challenges in terms of new regulations, financial constraints and establishing efficient best practice related problems.