According to a recent study, adverse patient safety events across healthcare segments resulted in a cost burden of an estimated $317.93 BILLION on the US and European healthcare systems in 2016.
This cost is estimated to increase at a CAGR of 3.2% and reach $383.7 BILLION in 2022.
Sometimes, PE is the forgotten Time Sensitive Emergency - until you are faced with "that patient" an hour before the end of your shift.
3rd year Medical Student clinical orientation:
"Here is your pager and instructional YouTube video on how to use a fax machine. If you need a refresher on how to find a patient's ECG on a blast email without the patient's name being on any of the ECGs or emails, please talk to IT.
One of the most exciting things coming out of ISC 2018 is the extension of the window of treatment for stroke.
However, appropriate messaging of this finding is critical. The key takeaway is WE CAN TREAT MORE PATIENTS when appropriately selected with perfusion imaging.
SILOS are one of the biggest problems facing healthcare.
The patient's journey crosses multiple healthcare entities and/or departments in a hospital. This has massive implications on real time team communication. However, equally important is how many hospitals and regions approach addressing communication problems from a budgetary or evaluation standpoint.
Last week, I wrote about why patient-centric healthcare, as we currently practice it, is a failed philosphy. If you missed that post, check it out here.
This week, my message is simple -- because the solution is simple. The solution involves one intuitive yet rare change in today's heatlhcare landscape. The solution is also the Future of Healthcare Communication: CONNECTED TEAMS.
Does this look familiar?
Medical error is the third leading cause of death and contributes to 10,000 serious medical complications every day. 80% of these errors occur secondary to miscommunication during transitions of care.
A recent article published on USA Today's website interviewed the CEO of Leapfrog Group, which assigns grades to hospitals based on "medical errors, infections and injuries, patient responses to surveys, [and] data provided to CMS, the American Hospital Association, and voluntarily to Leapfrog."
Perhaps the most striking point the article made was one that we've been trying to bring to light since Pulsara was founded. In fact, it's the reason WHY Pulsara was founded: "[These] problems are 'all too common,' with more than 500 people a day dying from preventable errors in hospitals."
I've often been asked what the hardest problem is that we face in healthcare. I believe PATIENT CENTRIC healthcare as we practice it is a failed model. Clinicians focus on serving the patient only when they are touching the patient.
This does not make any sense. As an ER Physician, I can't take care of the patient by myself. It takes a team. To complicate things even more, that team is often necessarily comprised of individuals who work for different health care entities.
You chose this career.
Why?
Why did you go into public safety? Why did you go into healthcare? Why did you choose your specialty?
There are a number of possible reasons: Money. Prestige. Honor. Love. Fear. Anger. Hope. Adrenaline. Desire. Pressure. People.
Many of us in public safety and healthcare are just wired differently — especially those of us who deal with time sensitive emergencies. Imagine a group of people witnessing an emergency - a house fire, a car crash, a mass casualty event, a cardiac arrest, a sudden collapse, a STEMI, a stroke. If you were to watch their responses, you would see three types of people:
Is your job in healthcare to focus on and serve only the patient or is it also to serve others on the TEAM who are caring for the patient?
Patient centric healthcare as we currently practice it is a failed philosophy. We focus on serving the patient for a finite moment in time even though the patient's journey extends well beyond our specific tasks.
In this mindset, we have a system where we — yes, you and I — cause 400,000 deaths per year and 10,000 serious medical complications every day, costing the U.S. an estimated one trillion dollars a year. Additionally, 80% of these errors occur secondary to miscommunication during transitions of care.
Patient centric healthcare is not enough. We need to realize that just serving the patient is not enough — we ALSO need to serve the fellow clinicians who are serving the patient. We need patient- and people-centric healthcare.
Healthcare systems must continue to adopt mobile-friendly platforms to meet users' expectations and offer high-quality care.
Many industries have overhauled their businesses to meet consumers’ expectations of using their mobile devices to do everything from checking in for a flight to ordering takeout food. The healthcare industry has been slower to adopt mobile-friendly platforms, but it is increasingly doing so to meet patients’ and health professionals’ needs. But simply taking current methods of communication and putting them on smartphones is not sufficient — platforms must capitalize on the many advantages mobile technology offers in order to truly transform and improve healthcare.
Researchers find a significant number of communication failures at hospitals. Could they be contributing to preventable patient deaths and disability?
A study in Toronto found that over a two-month period, 14 percent of all pages went to the wrong physician and nearly half of those were emergent or urgent communications.
A study that examined communication failures at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Toronto General Hospital in Toronto, Canada, found that over a two-month period, 14 percent of pages were sent to the wrong physician.[12] That’s an estimated 4,300 misdirected pages each year—half of which are related to emergency or urgent matters.
Physician collaboration is associated with fewer patient deaths, readmissions, and emergency room visits.
A study of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) found that when physicians collaborated more, patients had a 24 percent lower rate of emergency room visits and hospital readmissions, and a 28 percent lower rate of death.[10]
Physician groups that worked more closely together in caring for patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures were able to produce better patient outcomes, according to recent research.[11] The study examined claims data for 251,630 patients who underwent CABG between 2008 and 2011; the patients received care from 466,243 physicians across more than a thousand health systems. At 60 days post-procedure, patients treated by physician teams with higher levels of cooperation had:
Communication and operational changes at hospitals, and within EMS systems, play key role in recent drop in the death rate from heart attacks.
Although heart disease is still the number one killer of American adults, in recent years the nation has witnessed a dramatic decrease in the death rate from heart attacks. From 2003 to 2013, the rate at which people in the U.S. died from heart disease dropped 38%.[7]
This striking improvement can be attributed to a number of factors, including more effective treatments for heart disease and risk factors like high cholesterol and high blood pressure. In addition, fewer people are smoking these days. And notably, some hospitals have made sweeping changes in how they treat people having heart attacks. Many of those changes have not involved new drug therapies or procedures, but simply operational shifts that address patient flow and provider communication.
Research suggests that medical errors play an even bigger role in preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals than previously estimated, and 80 percent of all serious medical errors involve miscommunication. That amounts to 250,000 - 400,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Tools that help medical professionals communicate more quickly, accurately, and collaboratively are critical to saving lives.
More than fifteen years ago, the Institute of Medicine released a groundbreaking report on the incidence of medical errors in U.S. hospitals. The report suggested as many as 98,000 people die every year from medical errors.[1] Recent analysis from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says that report may have significantly underestimated the problem, putting the actual number closer to 250,000 - 400,000.[2] In fact, medical error is now considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
It’s About People.
As a society, we are obsessed with things. In fact, we have so many things, we’ve created the Internet of Things (IoT) to help us manage and learn from our things.
What is the IoT?
As an emergency room physician, I experience firsthand the impact of outdated communication systems — how they hamper good patient care and challenge even the most talented, dedicated, and well-trained medical professionals. In emergency situations, when seconds count, fast and accurate communication between care teams can mean the difference between life and death.
Bridging therapy made functional independence equally likely for stroke patients transported first to primary stroke centers without endovascular capabilities and peers taken straight to a comprehensive stroke center, a study showed.That strategy of IV thrombolysis within 4.5 hours of symptom onset at one center followed by transport to another where mechanical thrombectomy can be performed within 6 hours of symptom onset was just as likely to produce good functional outcomes 3 months later (modified Rankin scale scores of 2 or below) as transporting patients straight to a thrombectomy-capable center (61.0% versus 50.8%, P=0.26) -- even after multivariable adjustment (P=0.82).
