Safe Patients Smart Hospitals

The inspiring story of how a leading innovator in patient safety found a simple way to save countless lives. First, do no harm-doctors, nurses and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country, errors are made every single day - avoidable, simple mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two medical mistakes that not only ended in unnecessary deaths but hit close to home, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time. Dr. Pronovost began with simple improvements to a common procedure in the ER and ICU units at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Creating an easy five-step checklist based on the most up-to-date research for his fellow doctors and nurses to follow, he hoped that streamlining the procedure itself could slow the rate of infections patients often died from. But what Dr. Pronovost discovered was that doctors and nurses needed more than a checklist: the day-to-day environment needed to be more patient-driven and staff needed to see scientific results in order to know their efforts were a success. After those changes took effect, the units Dr. Pronovost worked with decreased their rate of infection by 70%. Today, all fifty states are implementing Dr. Pronovost's programs, which have the potential to save more lives than any other medical innovation in the past twenty-five years. But his ideas are just the beginning of the changes being made by doctors and nurses across the country making huge leaps to improve patient care. In Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, Dr. Pronovost shares his own experience, anecdotal stories from his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and other hospitals that have made his approach their own, alongside comprehensive research-showing readers how small changes make a huge difference in patient care. Inspiring and thought provoking, this compelling book shows how one person with a cause really can make a huge difference in our lives.

New York Times Bestseller “Every once in a while a book comes along that rocks the foundations of an established order that's seriously in need of being shaken. The modern American hospital is that establishment and Unaccountable is that book.”-Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses. Why? To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market. Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare system.

Organizations around the world are using Lean to redesign care and improve processes in a way that achieves and sustains meaningful results for patients, staff, physicians, and health systems. Lean Hospitals, Third Edition explains how to use the Lean methodology and mindsets to improve safety, quality, access, and morale while reducing costs, increasing capacity, and strengthening the long-term bottom line. This updated edition of a Shingo Research Award recipient begins with an overview of Lean methods. It explains how Lean practices can help reduce various frustrations for caregivers, prevent delays and harm for patients, and improve the long-term health of your organization. The second edition of this book presented new material on identifying waste, A3 problem solving, engaging employees in continuous improvement, and strategy deployment. This third edition adds new sections on structured Lean problem solving methods (including Toyota Kata), Lean Design, and other topics. Additional examples, case studies, and explanations are also included throughout the book. Mark Graban is also the co-author, with Joe Swartz, of the book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Frontline Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements, which is also a Shingo Research Award recipient. Mark and Joe also wrote The Executive’s Guide to Healthcare Kaizen.

From the nation’s leading experts in healthcare safety—the first comprehensive guide to delivering care that ensures the safety of patients and staff alike. One of the primary tenets among healthcare professionals is, “First, do no harm.” Achieving this goal means ensuring the safety of both patient and caregiver. Every year in the United States alone, an estimated 4.8 million hospital patients suffer serious harm that is preventable. To address this industry-wide problem—and provide evidence-based solutions—a team of award-winning safety specialists from Press Ganey/Healthcare Performance Improvement have applied their decades of experience and research to the subject of patient and workforce safety. Their mission is to achieve zero harm in the healthcare industry, a lofty goal that some hospitals have already accomplished—which you can, too. Combining the latest advances in safety science, data technology, and high reliability solutions, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement 6 simple principles in your workplace. 1. Commit to the goal of zero harm.2. Become more patient-centric.3. Recognize the interdependency of safety, quality, and patient-centricity.4. Adopt good data and analytics.5. Transform culture and leadership.6. Focus on accountability and execution. In Zero Harm, the world’s leading safety experts share practical, day-to-day solutions that combine the latest tools and technologies in healthcare today with the best safety practices from high-risk, yet high-reliability industries, such as aviation, nuclear power, and the United States military. Using these field-tested methods, you can develop new leadership initiatives, educate workers on the universal skills that can save lives, organize and train safety action teams, implement reliability management systems, and create long-term, transformational change. You’ll read case studies and success stories from your industry colleagues—and discover the most effective ways to utilize patient data, information sharing, and other up-to-the-minute technologies. It’s a complete workplace-ready program that’s proven to reduce preventable errors and produce measurable results—by putting the patient, and safety, first.

This exceptional book for nurses and nursing students guides the development of the comprehensive, professional communication skills to prevent errors that result in patient injuries and death. With a patient-safety focus, thorough coverage of communication and extensive, interactive ancillaries, it demonstrates how communication is tied to desired clinical outcomes.

This guide provides a step-by-step explanation of how to use the Safe Hospitals Checklist, and how the evaluation can be used to obtain a rating of the structural and nonstructural safety, and the emergency and disaster management capacity, of the hospital. The results of the evaluation enable hospital's own safety index to be calculated. The Hospital Safety Index tool may be applied to individual hospitals or to many hospitals in a public or private hospital network, or in an administrative or geographical area. In some countries, such as Moldova, all government hospitals have been evaluated using the Hospital Safety Index. In this respect, the Hospital Safety Index provides a useful method of comparing the relative safety of hospitals across a country or region, showing which hospitals need investment of resources to improve the functioning of the health system. The purpose of this Guide for Evaluators is to provide guidance to evaluators on applying the checklist, rating a hospital's safety and calculating the hospital's safety index. The evaluation will facilitate the determination of the hospital's capacity to continue providing services following an adverse event, and will guide the actions necessary to increase the hospital's safety and preparedness for response and recovery in case of emergencies and disasters. Throughout this document, the terms "safe" or "safety" cover structural and nonstructural safety and the emergency and disaster management capacity of the hospital. The Hospital Safety Index is a tool that is used to assess hospitals' safety and vulnerabilities, make recommendations on necessary actions, and promote low-cost/high-impact measures for improving safety and strengthening emergency preparedness. The evaluation provides direction on how to optimize the available resources to increase safety and ensure the functioning of hospitals in emergencies and disasters. The results of the evaluation will assist hospital managers and staff, as well as health system managers and decision-makers in other relevant ministries or organizations in prioritizing and allocating limited resources to strengthen the safety of hospitals in a complex network of health services. It is a tool to guide national authorities and international cooperation partners in their planning and resource allocation to support improvement of hospital safety and delivery of health services after emergencies and disasters. Over the past three years, the expert advice of policy-makers and practitioners from disciplines, such as engineering, architecture and emergency medicine, has been compiled, reviewed and incorporated into this second edition of the Guide. Global and regional workshops and virtual consultations have enabled technical and policy experts to contribute to the revision of Hospital Safety Index until consensus was reached on the content for its publication and distribution. Further comments and observations are certain to arise as the Hospital Safety Index continues to be applied across the world and these experiences will enable us to improve future editions. The rapid diagnostic application of the Hospital Safety Index provides, as a comparison, an out-of-focus snapshot of a hospital: it shows enough of the basic features to allow evaluators to confirm or disprove the presence of genuine risks to the safety of the hospital, and the hospital's level of preparedness for the emergencies and disasters to which it will be expected to provide health services in the emergency response. The Hospital Safety Index also takes into account the hospital's environment and the health services network to which it belongs. This second version of the second edition was released in December 2016.

This book reports on the theoretical foundations, fundamental applications and latest advances in various aspects of connected services for health information systems. The twelve chapters highlight state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies and systems for the design, development, deployment and innovative use of multisensory systems and tools for health management in smart city ecosystems. They exploit technologies like deep learning, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, cyber physical systems and sensor networks. Presenting the latest developments, identifying remaining challenges, and outlining future research directions for sensing, computing, communications and security aspects of connected health systems, the book will mainly appeal to academic and industrial researchers in the areas of health information systems, smart cities, and augmented reality.

The New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third. In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds. An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.