8 Stories You Need: How Great IT Impacts Human Touch, Bedside Shift Change, Treat Patients Like People

We know you’re busy, but we don’t want you to miss important healthcare quality and patient safety news. Here’s 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. Perspective: One patient’s satisfied experience with hospital IT
   Read this author’s account of his recent trip to a state-of-the-art emergency department. Learn how remarkable Health IT impacted engagement and efficiency while simultaneously intensifying the “human touch” felt along the way.
2. Evaluation of Perioperative Medication Errors and Adverse Drug Events
   Access a new study from Massachusetts General Hospital and published in the journal, Anesthesiology, which found that a medication error or adverse drug event occurred in more than half of surgical procedures.
3. The Most Crucial Half-Hour at a Hospital: The Shift Change
   While some nursing units have been reluctant to adopt bedside reporting practices, conducting shift-change conferences in the presence of the patient and family is becoming a key safety strategy in many facilities.
4. Safety still shaky at most hospitals, says Leapfrog
   Hospital safety scores, just released by The Leapfrog Group, show improvement in eight key safety measures but reveal decline in other areas including critical measures such as foreign objects left in after surgery.
5. Bad data vs. no data: Defending ProPublica
   Dr. Ashish Jha takes a stand for transparency and makes a run at dousing the firestorm surrounding ProPublica‘s release of Surgeon Scorecard data. According to Jha, while there may be problems with the organization’s methodology, the reported results still hold value for patients and physicians.
6. A hospital worker has the most satisfying job in the world — You’d be surprised which one
   When staff truly understand and are committed to an organization’s mission, great reward often comes from “unofficial” duties. And in these cases, the employee wins; the patient and family wins, and the organization as whole wins.
7. What is Reliability?
   Watch this seven-minute video, the first in a new series produced by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, describing the steps a team should take to create a reliable process or system.
8. 10 most common patient complaints, grievances with hospitals
   Here’s a revealing list of the things that bother patients most. Compiled by Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Peter Pronovost, MD,  and the hospital’s patient relations director, Jan Hill, the list was published in U.S. News & World Report and points to tangible ways hospitals can treat patients more like people.