Remember this old medical joke: the operation was successful, but the patient died? It has become a cliché that often characterizes business operations and military activities. The quip perfectly describes the relationship between quality and …
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In a 1964 Supreme Court case, Justice Potter Steward wrote the majority opinion on whether a movie violated Ohio’s pornography laws. Potter wrote, “I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material,” and …
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John Snow, the English physician who removed the handle from the Broad Street pump and halted the 1854 London cholera epidemic, is considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology. His work led to fundamental …
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Information technology systems are evolving. The goal is to use healthcare information technology to identify the best care processes and use the technology to ensure that these best processes are utilized worldwide.
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As organizations work at deploying health information technology and deliver clinical transformation through redesigned workflows, they need to recognize the basis for many of the errors we, as human beings, make in our everyday lives.
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Effective use of information technology to reduce medical errors requires identifying the cause of the medical errors and the clinical transformation—the change in how we clinically do something—that reduces the probability of the error occurring.
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