Sutter Health to tackle healthcare-acquired infections
Sutter Health in Sacramento, Calif. will spend $10 million over the next two years on improving patient safety, with one focus on reducing healthcare-acquired infections. The Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded Sutter a $3.6 million grant, the third multi-million dollar award it has given the health network. Sutter Health has committed an additional $7.2 million for the patient safety projects. The network invests in patient-oriented information technology, such as medication bar coding, the electronic intensive care unit and the electronic health record.
Where or where should the data go?
No issue is more important to healthcare providers than data management, according to a new global survey of healthcare executives, conducted by BridgeHead Software, which develops and markets healthcare storage virtualization solutions. Forty-four percent of respondents to BridgeHead Software's Healthcheck 2010 Survey of hospitals and healthcare organizations worldwide indicate that data backup/business continuity/disaster recovery is their top IT investment priority throughout 2010 and likely beyond.
Vanderbilt puts focus on continuity of care
Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, one of the leading academic medical centers of the mid-South and the flagship of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has selected Allscripts Care Management's discharge planning solution to ensure continuity of care and improve the efficiency of the hospital patient discharge process. Allscripts's Web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution will connect Vanderbilt online with more than 90,000 post-acute care providers nationwide, enabling the hospital's staff to give patients the widest possible choice of facilities and home care agencies that meet their post-discharge needs. In place of the labor-intensive manual workflow and data management that discharge planning now requires at Vanderbilt, the Allscripts solution will automate the entire process from end to end, said officials.
Study shows bar-cording with eMAR improves safety
The use of bar-code technology with an electronic medication administration record (eMAR) substantially reduces errors, including potential drug-related adverse events, according to a new study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The findings have important implications because bar-code eMAR technology is being considered as a 2013 criterion for meaningful use of health information technology under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The study, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, was published in the May 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
