What’s New in the Patient Safety World
May 2019
ECRI 2019 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns
Every year ECRI Institute publishes its list of the “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations”.
This year’s ECRI Top 10 list (ECRI 2019):
1. Diagnostic Stewardship and Test Result Management Using EHRs
2. Antimicrobial Stewardship in Physician Practices and Aging Services
3. Burnout and Its Impact on Patient Safety
4. Patient Safety Concerns Involving Mobile Health
5. Reducing Discomfort with Behavioral Health
6. Detecting Changes in a Patient’s Condition
7. Developing and Maintaining Skills
8. Early Recognition of Sepsis across the Continuum
9. Infections from Peripherally Inserted IV Lines
10. Standardizing Safety Efforts across Large Health Systems
We’ve covered most of these topics in numerous columns. As usual, we’ll only comment on a few of this year’s topics and let you go to the ECRI document for details of these and all the others.
ECRI’s #1 would also be our #1. It deals with ensuring that we have systems in place to follow up on all diagnostic studies and ways to communicate results to all appropriate parties. While it focuses on using EHR’s for this purpose, it clearly notes the importance of using all forms of communication to ensure “closing the loop”.
New to this year’s list is #9 “Infections from Peripherally Inserted IV Lines”. So add infection risk to the complications of peripheral IV’s we discussed in our February 26, 2019 Patient Safety Tip of the Week “Vascular Access Device Dislodgements”.
The ECRI report also has links to ECRI’s many fine resources for each topic. We’ll let you go to the full ECRI list for details. Click here to go to the ECRI Institute site where you can download the list. And see the links to our many columns on “closing the loop” listed below.
See also our other columns on communicating significant results:
- May 1, 2007 “The Missed Cancer”
- February 12, 2008 “More on Tracking Test Results”
- October 13, 2009 “Slipping Through the Cracks”
- July 2009 “Failure to Inform Patients of Clinically Significant Outpatient Test Results”
- March 9, 2010 “Communication of Urgent or Unexpected Radiology Findings”
- March 1, 2011 “Tests Pending at Discharge”
- August 21, 2012 “More on Missed Followup of Tests in Hospital”
- October 2, 2012 “Test Results: Everyone’s Worst Nightmare”
- March 12, 2013 “More on Communicating Test Results”
- October 2013 “New AHRQ Toolkit: Improving Your Office Testing Process”
- January 2014 “Email Alerts for Pending Test Results”
- July 2015 “Technology to Avoid Delays in Follow-up of Significant Results”
- November 17, 2015 “Patient Perspectives on Communication of Test Results”
- December 20, 2016 “End-of-Rotation Transitions and Mortality”
- September 2018 “ECRI Institute Partnership: Closing the Loop”
References:
ECRI Institute. Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2019. ECRI Institute 2019
https://www.ecri.org/landing-top-10-patient-safety-concerns-2019
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