Improving The Quality Of The Medication Use Process

Open up Improving the Quality of the Medication Use Process: Error Prevention and Reducing Adverse Drug Events, and you?ll gain instant access to crucial data pertaining to the prevention, detection, and research of error in health care, specifically in the pharmacy profession. Under the direction of this collection of current and timely chapters, you?ll find that you can become more adept at defining error, determining the factors that contribute to error, and deciding how medication errors can be reduced and even completely prevented. Each year, an estimated 120,000 preventable deaths and nearly 1,000,000 injuries occur during the course of medical treatment--a staggering and alarming figure. Improving the Quality of the Medication Use Process takes a hard look at such misguided health care and proposes quick and effective methods for intervention on the part of the individual professional and the health care community at large. These and other topics will help you in your efforts to identify error and design methods of error prevention: the causes of medication errors strategies relative to system modifications--practice standards, packaging, labeling, and product identity accountability issues from various multidisciplinary health care sectors the medical, ethical, and public policy considerations associated with medication errors and patient injuries various system and practice initiatives currently being implemented to facilitate the medication use process Improving the Quality of the Medication Use Process is a book for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, health care system managers, the pharmaceutical industry, and the average citizen who has been in the health care system and wants to be informed before the next trip to the office or drugstore. Read it, and you?ll find that you more clearly understand the problems leading up to adverse drug events. You?ll also feel more dedicated to taking the proactive measures that will minimize or even eliminate medication errors.

v. 1. Research findings -- v. 2. Concepts and methodology -- v. 3. Implementation issues -- v. 4. Programs, tools and products.

In 1996 the Institute of Medicine launched the Quality Chasm Series, a series of reports focused on assessing and improving the nation's quality of health care. Preventing Medication Errors is the newest volume in the series. Responding to the key messages in earlier volumes of the seriesâ€"To Err Is Human (2000), Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), and Patient Safety (2004)â€"this book sets forth an agenda for improving the safety of medication use. It begins by providing an overview of the system for drug development, regulation, distribution, and use. Preventing Medication Errors also examines the peer-reviewed literature on the incidence and the cost of medication errors and the effectiveness of error prevention strategies. Presenting data that will foster the reduction of medication errors, the book provides action agendas detailing the measures needed to improve the safety of medication use in both the short- and long-term. Patients, primary health care providers, health care organizations, purchasers of group health care, legislators, and those affiliated with providing medications and medication- related products and services will benefit from this guide to reducing medication errors.

Gain a complete understanding of the principles of quality improvement and their application to present and future pharmacy practice "This book is a great resource for pharmacists and pharmacy students who want to learn about safety and quality in pharmacy practice."--Laura Cranston, RPh, Executive Director, The Pharmacy Quality Alliance Quality and Safety in Pharmacy Practice details the principles, approaches, strategies, and actions necessary to improve the overall safety and effectiveness of pharmacy services. Although one of the book’s primary goals is to enhance the quality of future health care, you will find guidelines that can be implemented immediately to improve today’s pharmacy practice. This comprehensive text offers a complete overview of quality in general, the reasons for improving practice, and actual day-to-day changes and approaches that will positively impact the patient. Quality and Safety in Pharmacy Practice is divided into five parts, covering: The current and future landscape of health care quality and the business case for quality improvement and value-driven health care Quality improvement concepts and tools, including statistical process control Quality and safety measurement, including mechanisms for gathering consumer feedback Incentives and other drivers of quality improvement Application of the principles of quality improvement to pharmacy practice -- complete with case examples

Managed Care Pharmacy Practice, Second Edition offers information critical to the development and operation of a managed care pharmacy program. The text also covers the changes that have taken place within the delivery of pharmacy services, as well as the evolving role of pharmacists.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

Drive to provide high value healthcare has created a field of medical quality improvement and safety. A Quality Improvement (QI) project would often aim in translate medical evidence (e.g. hand hygiene saves lives) into clinical practice (e.g. actually washing your hands before you see the patient, suffice it to say that not all hospitals are able to report 100% compliance with hand-hygiene). All doctoral residents in the United States must now satisfy a new requirement from the American College of Graduate Medical Education that they participate in a QI initiative. However, few departments are equipped to help their residents develop and implement a QI initiative. Resident’s Handbook is a short, not fussy, and practical introduction to developing a QI initiative. Meant not only for residents seeking to jump-start a QI initiative but also for attending physicians looking to improve their clinical practice, residency program directors and even medical students already eyeing what residency training holds for them; the book introduces and explains the basic tools needed to conduct a QI project. It provides numerous real-life examples of QI projects by the residents, fellows and attendings who designed them, who discuss their successes and failures as well as the specific tools they used. Several chapters provide a more senior perspective on resident involvement in QI projects and feature contributions from several QI leaders, a hospital administration VP and a residency program director. Though originally designed with physicians in mind, the book will also be helpful for physician assistants, nurses, physical, occupational and speech language pathology therapists, as well as students in these disciplines. Since no QI intervention is likely to be successful if attempted in isolation more non-physician clinicians are joining the ranks of quality and safety leadership. Therefore several non-physician clinician led initiatives included in the manuscript constitute an integral part of this book.The book serves as a short introduction to the field of medical quality improvement and safety emphasizing the practical pointers of how to actually implement a project from its inception to publication. To our knowledge this is the first concise do-it-yourself publication of its kind. Some of the topics covered include: how to perform an efficient literature search, how to get published, how to scope a project, how to generate improvement ideas, effective communication, team, project management and basic quality improvement tools like PDCA, DMAIC, Lean, Six Sigma, human factors, medical informatics etc.. Although no substitute for the services of a trained clinical statistician, chapters on statistics and critical assessment of the medical literature familiarizes residents with basic statistical methodologies, clinical trials and evidence based medicine (EBM). Since no QI project is complete without providing evidence for post-intervention improvement we provide a short introduction to the free statistical language R, which helps residents independently run basic statistical calculations. Because much of QI involves assessment of subjective human experiences, there is also a chapter on how to write surveys. Resident’s Handbook of Medical Quality and Safety is not an exhaustive QI textbook but rather a hands-on pocket guide to supplement formal training by other means.div

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine