The health care manager
-
The health care manager · Oct 2006
An organizational approach to understanding patient safety and medical errors.
Progress in patient safety, or lack thereof, is a cause for great concern. In this article, we argue that the patient safety movement has failed to reach its goals of eradicating or, at least, significantly reducing errors because of an inappropriate focus on provider and patient-level factors with no real attention to the organizational factors that affect patient safety. We describe an organizational approach to patient safety using different organizational theory perspectives and make several propositions to push patient safety research and practice in a direction that is more likely to improve care processes and outcomes. ⋯ This misfit is mainly due to lack of flexibility, cost containment, and lack of regulations, thus explaining the high level of errors committed in these organizations. From an organizational culture perspective, we argue that health care organizations must change their assumptions, beliefs, values, and artifacts to change their culture from a culture of blame to a culture of safety and thus reduce medical errors. From an organizational learning perspective, we discuss how reporting, analyzing, and acting on error information can result in reduced errors in health care organizations.
-
The health care manager · Oct 2006
Halfway there? Check to see if you are: six of 11 health insurance portability and accountability act rules are set.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act contains 11 rules, 6 of which have been released to date. Within each of the rules are numerous actions to be implemented. This article reviews those actions and provides health care managers with what exactly needs to be done to be in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act effectively and efficiently.