Improving Healthcare in a Healthcare Facility

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the patient incident reporting system at a hospital and explains that the present system, which is designed to track patient incidents such as falls, patient abuse and medication errors, as well as provide a means of implementing corrective action, is highly labor-intensive and cumbersome. The paper then proceeds to identify and describe six different initiatives that would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the current patient incident reporting system.

Table of Contents
Initiative No. 1. Use Existing Hospital Information
System for Patient Incident Reporting for JCAHO
Quality Assurance Tracking Purposes
Initiative No. 2. Installation of Hospital-Wide Patient
Records Database
Initiative No. 3. Use Existing IT Systems to Trend
Adverse Patient Incidents for Inclusion in Hospital-Wide
Quality Assurance Reports
Initiative No. 4. Applying Existing Information Systems
for Improved Inventory Control
Initiative No. 5. Implement Interactive Menu-Processing
System for Inpatients
Initiative No. 6. Improve Hospital and Grounds Security
by Using IT-Based Web Camera Applications

From the Paper:

"The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has already mandated that all accredited healthcare facilities have in place a means of tracking patient incidents such as falls, patient abuse, and medication errors and to provide a means of implementing corrective action when deficiencies are identified (Bryan & O'Connell 23). Although our hospital does in fact have such a patient incident reporting system in place, it is a highly labor-intensive paper form-based approach that requires copying and hand-delivery to the Office of Quality Assurance; furthermore, this paper-based system is easily transferable to the existing hospital-wide information system intranet. In this regard, the proposed online replacement should replicate the existing patient incident reporting system as closely as possible to ensure staff acceptance of this alternative (Auerbach, Beckerman, Cohen, Goldstein, Quitkin & Rock 134)."

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