Innovations

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and Lower Manhattan Hospital faced multiple challenges.

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a serious but preventable medical condition in which blood clots form in the veins.

An increasing volume of patients presenting for acute care can create a need for more ICU beds and intensivists and lead to longer wait times and boarding of critically ill patients in the emergency department (ED).¹ Data suggest that boarding of critically ill patients for more than 6 hours in the emergency department leads to poorer outcomes and increased mortality.^2,3 To address this issue, University of Michigan Health, part of Michigan Medicine, developed an ED-based ICU, the first of its kind, in its 1,000-bed adult hospital.

A lack of situational awareness can lead to delayed recognition of patient deterioration. This children’s hospital developed and implemented a situational awareness framework designed to decrease emergency transfers to the intensive care unit (ICU).

Checklists are used in many clinical settings to improve patient safety. This pediatric intensive care unit updated a static checklist, eSIMPLE, to a dynamic, decision-support enhanced checklist, eSIMPLER. 

The Revised Safer Dx Instrument provides a standardized list of questions to help users retrospectively identify and assess the likelihood of a missed diagnosis in a healthcare episode. Results of the assessment are intended for use in system-level safety improvement efforts, clinician feedback, and patient safety research.

The relationship between burnout among healthcare workers and poor patient safety outcomes has been well-documented

Understanding the ways in which human factors, such as non-technical skills, influence individual and team performance can ultimately improve patient safety, particularly in high-intensity settings such as operating rooms.

Medication administration errors are a common source of patient harm.

The handshake antimicrobial stewardship program (HS-ASP) was developed and implemented at Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHCO). In 2014, the CHOC HS-ASP team began labeling specific interventions as “Great Catches” which were considered to have altered, or had the potential to alter, the patient’s trajectory of care. CHOC researchers used these "Great Catches" to identify potential diagnostic errors.

The Patient Safe-D(ischarge) program used standardized tools to educate patients about their discharge needs, test understanding of those needs, and improve medication reconciliation at admission and discharge. A quasi-randomized controlled trial of the program found that it significantly increased patients' understanding and knowledge of their diagnoses, treatment, and required follow-up care.

The Hospital at Home^sm program provides hospital-level care (including daily physician and nurse visits, diagnostic testing, treatment, and other support) in a patient's home as a full substitute for acute hospital care for selected conditions that are common among seniors. Studies have shown that the Hospital at Home program results in lower length of stay, costs, readmission rates, and complications than does traditional inpatient care, and surveys indicate higher levels of patient and family member satisfaction than with traditional care.

Trauma staff at The Alfred Hospital use a computerized decision support system to guide the care of patients during the critical first 60 minutes of resuscitation. Known as the Trauma Reception and Resuscitation System (TR&R®), this program generates prompts based on more than 40 algorithms and real-time clinical data, including patient vital signs and information entered by a trauma nurse. Displayed on a large overhead monitor, these prompts are used by clinicians to direct the care of trauma patients and to facilitate documentation and communication.