By Jeffrey Brady MD MPH & David Meyers MD – Last March, during national Patient Safety Awareness Week 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. As we commemorate PSAW 2021—an annual event organized by our partners at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement — we celebrate the healthcare professionals who worked tirelessly this year to ensure the safety of patients.
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By Jeffrey Brady MD MPH – Questions are the answer—a simple concept that can apply to so many areas of our lives, but none more important than our healthcare. Through an ongoing collaboration with AHRQ, Google is piloting a new online tool to help patients plan for medical visits.
By Gopal Khanna MBA & Jeffrey Brady MD MPH – As we seek to develop a national healthcare system that delivers true 21st century care, we are confronted by a COVID-19 pandemic that has identified numerous challenges. Among the most important: the need to provide correct diagnoses.
By Jeffrey Brady MD MPH – Long before the COVID-19 crisis, AHRQ began funding research that examined the use of telemedicine to improve access to and delivery of healthcare. Research showed telemedicine to not only be effective at connecting practitioners to patients or even other clinical experts, but to also be an efficient and satisfactory mode of care.
By Jeffrey Brady MD MPH – For doctors, nurses, and other frontline care providers, treating patients with COVID-19 presents extreme challenges. Clinicians are working extra shifts under high-risk conditions. Suddenly, dedicated teams on “the front lines of care” face even more difficulties as they strive to protect their patients from safety threats.
By David Meyers MD & Jeff Brady MD, MPH – It takes a team effort to reduce potentially preventable hospital readmissions. Patients leaving the hospital need tailored education about how to take their medications, whether to get home care services, and when to follow up with their primary care physician.
By Jeff Brady MD, MPH – To make health care safer, we have to know when harm happens. If information about a patient safety event is incomplete or doesn’t exist, providers can’t make the necessary changes to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Clinicians are an important source of reports about harm that occurs in health care—or safety events—when they happen. But that’s just one perspective.
By Jeff Brady MD, MPH – The chances that you will receive safer care when you enter the hospital are increasing, according to a new report from AHRQ. Between 2010 and 2014, we estimate that 87,000 fewer patients died from hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), such as adverse drug events, pressure ulcers, and potentially dangerous infections.