Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Ensuring patient safety and decreasing errors are no doubt top priorities for U.S. hospitals. But finding simple solutions to these often complex problems and implementing new processes in institutions are the real challenges.

HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently released "practical tips for promoting a culture of patient safety, limiting shifts for medical residents and interns, and adopting interventions to reduce cases of ventilator-associated pneumonia and catheter-related urinary tract infections." And AHRQ attempts to do all of this in a simple tipsheet, called "10 Patient Safety Tips for Hospitals," which the agency released at the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations' annual patient safety conference in Chicago.

The tipsheet includes advice on how to reduce fatigue-related mistakes and how technology can help to improve clinical care, according to a recent AHRQ announcement.

"The care provided in hospitals every day is more prone to errors than other health settings because of the multiple people, processes and transitions in care delivery," AHRQ's director, Carolyn Clancy, MD, said in the announcement. "While many hospitals have made significant progress toward reducing the likelihood of patient harm associated with the delivery of health care, most continue to look for ways to promote patient safety on a day-to-day basis, and we hope these simple tips will help them do that."

The tipsheet is available online at www.ahrq.gov/qual/10tips.htm.