Journal of hospital medicine : an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine
-
Multicenter Study
Variation in printed handoff documents: Results and recommendations from a multicenter needs assessment.
Handoffs of patient care are a leading root cause of medical errors. Standardized techniques exist to minimize miscommunications during verbal handoffs, but studies to guide standardization of printed handoff documents are lacking. ⋯ Wide variation exists in the content of printed handoff documents. Standardizing printed handoff documents has the potential to decrease omissions of key data during patient care transitions, which may decrease the risk of downstream medical errors.
-
Patient satisfaction has been associated with improved outcomes and become a focus of reimbursement. ⋯ To our knowledge, this is the first intervention associated with a significant improvement in HCAHPS scores. This may serve as a model to increase patient satisfaction, hospital revenue, and train resident physicians.
-
Over a billion peripheral intravenous catheters (PIVCs) are inserted each year in hospitalized patients worldwide. However, international data on prevalence and management of these devices are lacking. The study assessed the prevalence of PIVCs and their management practices across different regions of the world. ⋯ We also found that overall, 25% of patients had no vascular device in place. The majority of PIVCs were inserted by nursing staff or a specialist team. The prevalence of idle PIVCs in place with no fluid or medication orders was 16%, and 12% of PIVCs had at least 1 symptom of phlebitis.
-
Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) incentivizes quality performance-based healthcare by linking payments directly to patient satisfaction scores obtained from Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys. Lower HCAHPS scores appear to cluster in heterogeneous population-dense areas and could bias Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reimbursement. ⋯ Demographic and structural factors (eg, hospital beds) predict patient satisfaction scores even after CMS adjustments. CMS should consider WIPSAS or a similar adjustment to account for the severity of patient satisfaction inequities that hospitals could strive to correct.