Category Archives: Healthcare@Risk™

#138 – HEALTHCARE@RISK – ALIGNING YOUR STRATEGIC VISION WITH YOUR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES – TED SCHMIDT

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00141With all of the changes in healthcare reimbursements, how do you ensure that your hospital is properly funded to meet your financial/operational needs while achieving your hospital’s vision? These changes are especially concerning for Hill-Burton hospitals, Safety Net hospitals, and faith-based hospitals that serve a disproportionate share of indigent patients. Continue reading →

#130 – RBT IN HEALTHCARE: PROCESS METABOLISM – TED SCHMIDT

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00141Process metabolism is a concocted term to describe and hopefully understand how our processes work in their environment. It’s a concept that we need to begin to embrace if we want to improve our patient safety. Embracing and understanding process metabolism in our high-risk processes will allow for better process design and therefore yield more reliable results. Continue reading →

#128 – ALARM FATIGUE – JEFF HARRIS

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AAA-Jeff-150x150In the mid 1960’s, a man witnessed an awful multi-car pileup in San Francisco. That man also happened to have a PhD in psychology and was an inventor as well and he decided to do something about rear end collisions. The result was a third brake light installed at the top of the rear window in automobiles. Testing showed that the addition of the third light reduced rear end collisions by 50 to 60%. Continue reading →

#126 – PROCESS DESIGN FOR PATIENT SAFETY – TED SCHMIDT

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00141Recently, I wrote about the benefits of using the SIPOC diagram for process identification and process control.   As a profession, we still struggle with this concept of process approach or process management. We too often revert back to our old practices of addressing issues by revising our procedures and conducting training on the newly revised procedure. We should be smart enough not to keep doing the same things and expect different results. Continue reading →

#126 – ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS: PANACEA OR PANDORA’S BOX? – JEFF HARRIS

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AAA-Jeff-150x150On September 25th, 2014, a 42 year old Liberian man in the U.S. visiting family fell ill and went to a Dallas, Texas hospital for treatment. He told the nurse that he had fever and abdominal pain and was from a West African country that was in the midst of an Ebola outbreak. The nurse duly noted this in their state of the art electronic health record (EHR) system and passed him along to the ER physician. He was sent home with antibiotics.  Eleven days later he became the first person in the U.S. to die of the Ebola virus and set up an epidemiological nightmare. Continue reading →