Safety-Quality Featured Content news and information

People waiting to read the Federation of State Medical Boards' annual report summarizing national statistics for doctor discipline are waiting in vain. The FSMB has quietly killed its Annual Summary of Board Actions report. The Federation, which has published the report since 1985, promises that a...
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Reprocessing single-use medical devices is not new. The practice has been around for decades, but the market has reported significant growth as more hospitals seek to save money and reduce waste.
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In an era of rising scrutiny of cardiac care, physicians are learning that their legal fates may hinge on one number—70%.
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National economic policies that impose harsh cuts on social programs, especially healthcare safety nets, can be lethal, literally. That's the argument made by David Stuckler, a senior research leader at Oxford University, and Dr. Sanjay Basu, a Stanford University epidemiologist, in their recent...
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The Obama administration and health policy experts have been touting last year's decline in Medicare 30-day hospital readmissions as evidence that delivery and payment reforms designed to prevent unnecessary repeat visits were starting to succeed.
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A simple vinegar test slashed cervical cancer death rates by one-third in a remarkable study of 150,000 women in the slums of India, where the disease is the top cancer killer of women.
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Much has changed in the years since the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, companion reports released in 1999 and 2001 that sounded the alarm about high rates of adverse events and the urgent need to adopt proven best practices in healthcare.
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The movement to standardize medical practice patterns, a key component of improving quality, is still a work in progress as hospital officials seeking to install common protocols continue to encounter pockets of resistance among
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Prodded by federal and state regulations, hospitals have made significant strides to combat hospital-acquired infections. Even so, some say more work needs to be done to address infections that occur outside the intensive-care unit and that hospitals should...
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When Dr. Rich Zane arrived last year at the University of Colorado Hospital, he found an emergency room built to handle 25,000 patients a year but was seeing 60,000.
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