4 Stories You Need But May Have Missed This Week

We know you’re busy, but we don’t want you to miss important healthcare quality and patient safety news. Below is a roundup of stories you may have missed but need to take a look at before calling it a week. (Sign up on the right if you’d like these news alerts delivered to you.)

1. How to Mitigate Risk by Improving Wound Documentation
   Proper documentation of chronic wounds, like pressure ulcers, is critical if hospitals are going to improve patient care while meeting specified quality indicators tied to reimbursement. Discover the sophisticated Silhouette™ system that facilitates accurate measurement and precise tracking of changes, seamless management of progress and widespread sharing of information.
2. Leapfrog Releases Another Hospital Safety Report Card
   A troubling trend seems to be evolving with The Leapfrog Group’s release of its fourth Hospital Safety Score report. Are hospitals really lagging when it comes to patient safety? Find your hospital’s score and read why many feel Leapfrog’s system may be flawed.
3. We Need Better Measures of Diagnostic Accuracy
   Patient Safety pioneer Bob Wachter reflects on industry changes since he delivered the keynote address at AHRQ’s first Diagnostic Errors in Medicine conference held in 2008. Learn which leaders, organizations, publications and tools Wachter credits with the spurring of significant progress in the field.
4. Peer Review of Surgeons’ Skills Carries ‘Threatening Undertones’
   A research team in Michigan has published the results of its first-of-a-kind study that rated the technical skills of experienced surgeons and paired them with outcomes. What they discovered was alarming: Patients of the most poorly rated surgeons were twice as likely to die and have post-operative complications than patients of surgeons with the highest scores. Hear what lead researcher, John Birkmeyer, MD, says about the team’s findings and what he believes needs to be done with this data.