CAM offerings really can enhance quality of care for some patients.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Complementary Therapies↗
Biomedical subjects
Sherrie Dulworth
Publications and source records attributed to Sherrie Dulworth.
Case management and patient safety: opportunities for process and performance improvement.
Awareness and activities about patient safety and the need for improvement are wide-spread within the health care industry, but the role and the expectation for case management in this area has not yet been well defined. Some case managers voice doubts about the ability to affect safety because they typically are not direct caregivers. Is it realistic to expect case managers and their organizations to influence and improve patient safety?
Benchmarking↗
Case management and quality: have we reached a tipping point?
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes a phenomenon in which a niche market or fad undergoes transformation into mainstream acceptability, resulting in widespread social change. He concludes that a "tipping point" occurs when a series of small events results in a critical mass of acceptance that produces sudden major changes.
Attitude to Health↗
Hospitals and the competitive edge: how educated boards make a difference.
Hospital leaders face challenges from many different arenas--business, finance, and patient care. One resource often overlooked as a strategic asset is the hospital board of directors. Too often hospital boards erroneously assume or are forced into the roles of either micro-management or crisis management. Board education, which focuses on pertinent healthcare market information and strategic decision making, can help board members' understanding of their roles. As part of its overall plan, hospital leadership should ensure that its board members understand the market environment and its effect upon the hospital's strategic directions, options, and priorities. This article focuses on the structure and type of information that board members need to know to better guide the hospital leadership through the decision-making process and to fulfill their obligations to the institution they serve.
Decision Making, Organizational↗
Commentary: Exploiting the overlap: using utilization management to reduce medical malpractice.
This report presents a practical way in which hospitals can reduce medical malpractice exposure that is related to omissions and delays in care. We illustrate our approach using the results of a risk/medical management study performed at an acute-care hospital. Traditional risk management (RM) often focuses retrospectively on adverse events and may miss opportunities to prevent errors related to omissions and delays in care. Close-to-real-time utilization management (UM) activity offers ready potential to improve quality and reduce medical malpractice--but only if UM can work synergistically with RM. It is our conclusion that hospitals can implement systematic processes to identify and intervene in patterns of omissions and delays and improve the communication and synergy among stakeholders and thereby improve patient safety and reduce their medical malpractice risks.
Communication↗
Healthcare-associated infections and length of hospital stay in the Medicare population.
This study uses cross-sectional analysis of huge Medicare hospital discharge databases to test the hypothesis that hospitals with longer inpatient average lengths of stay (ALOS) will have higher healthcare-associated infection (HAI) rates. For 4 carefully defined and important procedures, the authors investigated the relationship between a hospital's HAI rate and the ALOS for patients who did not have such an infection. The authors found a strong positive correlation between the 2 measures. This finding has important implications for improving patient safety and controlling cost. This article offers hypotheses on the causality of the ALOS-infection rate correlation and suggests ways to test those hypotheses.
Aged↗