Read the two Institute of Medicine Reports \"To Err is Human\" and \"Crossing th
ID: 349969 • Letter: R
Question
Read the two Institute of Medicine Reports "To Err is Human" and "Crossing the Quality Chasm." Discuss the effect that these reports had on the US healthcare system by describing the roles that national, private sector, and government initiatives play in the advancement of HIT. Evaluate the success that healthcare delivery has had in achieving those goals and the barriers to goal achievement. Provide substantive responses to two of your classmates.
To Err is Human:
http://iom.nationalacademies.org/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/1999/To-Err-is-Human/To%20Err%20is%20Human%201999%20%20report%20brief.pdf
Crossing the Quality Chasm:
http://iom.nationalacademies.org/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/2001/Crossing-the-Quality-Chasm/Quality%20Chasm%202001%20%20report%20brief.pdf
Support your ideas with research from our course sources and/or outside, scholarly sources. Cite a minimum of 2 articles.
Explanation / Answer
Read the two Institute of Medicine Reports "To Err is Human" and "Crossing the Quality Chasm." Discuss the effect that these reports had on the US healthcare system by describing the roles that national, private sector, and government initiatives play in the advancement of HIT. Evaluate the success that healthcare delivery has had in achieving those goals and the barriers to goal achievement. Provide substantive responses to two of your classmates.
The release of the Institute of Medicine’s report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System in 1999, raised considerable awareness of the magnitude of patient safety issues in the United States and catalyzed a significant amount of leadership and action in the field
Numerous studies show that IT plays a key role in improving the safety and quality of health care. Recognizing this role, the federal government has invested more than $36 billion in health IT and the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs). As a result, the use of health IT is now widespread, with 88 percent of hospitals and 87 percent of physicians now using an HER
Health care in the United States is not as safe as it should be--and can be. At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented, according to estimates from two major studies. Even using the lower estimate, preventable medical errors in hospitals exceed attribute able deaths to such feared threats as motor-vehicle wrecks, breast cancer, and AIDS. Medical errors can be defined as the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim.
Among the problems that commonly occur during the course of providing health care are adverse drug events and improper transfusions, surgical injuries and wrong-site surgery, suicides, restraint-related injuries or death, falls, burns, pressure ulcers, and mistaken patient identities. High error rates with serious consequences are most likely to occur in intensive care units, operating rooms, and emergency departments. Beyond their cost in human lives, preventable medical errors exact other significant tolls.
They have been estimated to result in total costs (including the expense of additional care necessitated by the errors, lost income and household productivity, and disability) of between $17 billion and $29 billion per year in hospitals nationwide. Errors also are costly in terms of loss of trust in the health care system by patients and diminished satisfaction by both patients and health professionals. Patients who experience a long hospital stay or disability as a result of errors pay with physical and psychological discomfort.
Health professionals pay with loss of morale and frustration at not being able to provide the best care possible. Society bears the cost of errors as well, in terms of lost worker productivity, reduced school attendance by children, and lower levels of population health status.
Health care organizations must develop a “culture of safety” such that their workforce and processes are focused on improving the reliability and safety of care for patients. Safety should be an explicit organizational goal that is demonstrated by strong leadership on the part of clinicians, executives, and governing bodies. This will mean incorporating a variety of well-understood safety principles, such as designing jobs and working conditions for safety; standardizing and simplifying equipment, supplies, and processes; and enabling care providers to avoid reliance on memory. Systems for continuously monitoring patient safety also must be created and adequately funded.
The medication process provides an example where implementing better systems will yield better human performance. Medication errors now occur frequently in hospitals, yet many hospitals are not making use of known systems for improving safety, such as automated medication order entry systems, nor are they actively exploring new safety systems.
Patients themselves also could provide a major safety check in most hospitals, clinics, and practice. They should know which medications they are taking, their appearance, and their side effects, and they should notify their doctors of medication discrepancies and the occurrence of side effects
In 1996, after releasing America's Health in Transition: Protecting and Improving Quality, the IOM launched a concerted, ongoing effort focused on assessing and improving the nation's quality of care.
The first phase of this Quality Initiative documented the serious and pervasive nature of the nation's overall quality problem, concluding that "the burden of harm conveyed by the collective impact of all of our health care quality problems is staggering"
Strategy for Reinventing the System
Bringing state-of-the-art care to all Americans in every community will require a fundamental, sweeping redesign of the entire health system, according to a report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, prepared by the IOM’s Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America and released in March 2001, concludes that merely making incremental improvements in current systems of care will not suffice.
The committee already has spoken to one urgent care problem--patient safety--in a 1999 report titled To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Concluding that tens of thousands of Americans die each year as a result of preventable mistakes in their care, the report lays out a comprehensive strategy by which government, health care providers, industry, and consumers can reduce medical errors.
Crossing the Quality Chasm focuses more broadly on how the health system can be reinvented to foster innovation and improve the delivery of care. Toward this goal, the committee presents a comprehensive strategy and action plan for the coming decade.
Six Aims for Improvement Advances must begin with all health care constituencies--health professionals, federal and state policy makers, public and private purchasers of care, regulators, organization managers and governing boards, and consumers--committing to the parties also would adopt a shared vision of six specific aims for improvement. These aims are built around the core need for health care to be:
• Safe: avoiding injuries to patients from the care that is intended to help them.
• Effective: providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit, and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit.
• Patient-centered: providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.
• Timely: reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.
• Efficient: avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy.
• Equitable: providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status
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