Healthcare quarterly (Toronto, Ont.)
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In April 2012, the Ontario government introduced Health System Funding Reform (HSFR), a transformational shift in how hospitals are funded. Mount Sinai Hospital recognized that moving from global funding to a "patient-based" model would have substantial operational and clinical implications. Adjusting to the new funding environment was set as a top corporate priority, serving as the strategic basis for re-examining and redesigning operations to further improve both quality and efficiency. Two years into HSFR, this article outlines Mount Sinai Hospital's approach and highlights key lessons learned.
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Quality is being measured and reported across healthcare organizations and sectors, but efforts are rarely made to connect the activity in one organization to quality experienced by patients and clients in another part of the healthcare system. This article describes one regional health organization's journey to measuring health quality at a system level. The authors describe a highly consultative and iterative process used to measure quality across the continuum of care, and the challenges experienced in approaching this type of measurement, and they highlight some of the early findings.
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The safety of patients and of employees in healthcare have historically been separately managed and regulated. Despite efforts to reduce injury rates for employees and adverse events for patients, healthcare organizations continue to see less-than-optimal outcomes in both domains. This article challenges readers to consider how the traditional siloed approach to patient and employee safety can lead to duplication of effort, confusion, missed opportunities and unintended consequences. The authors propose that only through integrating patient and employee safety activities and challenging the paradigms that juxtapose the two will healthcare organizations experience sustained and improved safety practice and outcomes.
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In 2011, a panel of primary healthcare (PHC) providers in Nova Scotia rated 19 of 35 selected Canadian Institute for Health Information (2006) clinical quality indicators (QIs) as "acceptable." In this study, the authors explored the feasibility of extracting electronic medical record (EMR) data required to create these PHC QI measures.