Recent Medicare legislation seeks to improve patient care quality by financially penalizing providers for hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). However, Medicare cannot directly monitor HAI rates, and instead relies on providers accurately self-reporting HAIs in claims to correctly assess...

Rund jeder tausendste Krankenhauspatient stirbt aufgrund vermeidbarer unerwünschter Ereignisse. Empirische Studien zeigen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Sicherheitskultur in Krankenhäusern und der Fehlerhäufigkeit. Die bisherige Forschung weist allerdings Theoriedefizite auf. Unter Heranziehung...

The SHEEP model allows the frequency of risk factors to be analysed at individual, team and department levels over time. Recognition of repeated patterns of factors can then provide efficient and effective targeting of sparse health resources to reduce patient safety failures.

‘Patient Safety' tries to increase safety and transparency within healthcare systems for both patients and professionals. Within the healthcare sector, workflows become more and more complex, while time and money become scarce. As a consequence, the risk awareness, fault management and quality...

Medication errors occur as a consequence of misunderstandings with abbreviations and symbols (A&S). According to pharmaceutical regulations, A&S should be avoided in medicine package leaflets (PLs). Using a sample of 531 Portuguese PLs, this study aims at: quantifying A&S in PLs, comparing how...

Background: Hospitals need to accurately manage mobile devices (e.g., intravenous pumps) associated to their patients and health providers to ensure patient safety. Some hospitals have already invested substantially in real-time location system (RTLS) technology, a specific type of Internet of...

Large-scale deployment of electronic Prescription and Patient Summary services (eP/ PS) is expected to enable seamless cross-border care and secure access to patient health information between European healthcare systems. Guaranteeing national readiness to support priorities, determined at the...

The purpose of this work is to expose challenges related to the implementation of quality electronic medical record (EMR) systems in public hospitals in Greece, a country where the national health system (NHS) has already acquired electronic medical records (EMRs). The level of EMR...

A widely discussed shortcoming of long-term care in nursing homes for elderly is the inappropriate or suboptimal drug utilization, in particular the utilization of psychotropic drugs. This paper estimates the effect of institutionalization on the drug intake of frail elderly using administrative...