Performance feedback is an essential component of patient safety and quality improvement. In this participatory study, researchers engaged hospitalists in design sessions and surveys to develop a performance dashboard and feedback system. Physicians preferred that the dashboard be used to aid in clinical practice improvement as part of a non-punitive system.

Based on a survey of hospital medicine groups at academic medical centers in the United States (conducted April 2020), the authors of this study characterized inpatient adaptations to care for non-ICU COVID-19 patients. Sites reported rapid expansion of respiratory isolation units (RIUs – dedicated units for patients with known or suspected COVID-19), an emphasis on telemedicine for patient evaluation, and implementation of approaches to minimize room entry. In addition, nearly half of responding sites reported diagnostic errors involving COVID-19 (missing non-COVID-19 diagnoses among infected patients and missing COVID-19 diagnoses in patients admitted for other reasons).

… discusses the results of an intervention that incorporated a structured process for residents to gather information and …

… time, the World Health Organization ICD-11 will include a taxonomy for quality and safety events . Researchers … detection of errors, adverse events, and near misses on a population level. …

Patients hospitalized and cared for by an overnight physician, known as "holdover admissions," are increasingly common due to duty hours limitations, and they necessitate handoffs between admitting physicians and the new primary medical team. This qualitative study identified unmet needs in holdover handoffs, including assessment of diagnostic uncertainty, standardization, and feedback. The authors call for more scrutiny of holdover handoffs.

Overuse of therapies, medications, and procedures can contribute to both financial and physical harm. This commentary explores an incident involving medical overuse, discusses whether overuse should be assessed like adverse events, and outlines steps the care team should have taken in treating this patient.

Hospitals with high readmission rates face reductions in Medicare reimbursements. Understanding the patient perspective at the time of readmission may better inform future readmission reduction efforts. Researchers surveyed patients readmitted to the general medicine services within 30 days of discharge across 12 hospitals on multiple aspects of self-care. Although 91% of patients reported understanding of their discharge plan, more than 52% reported difficulty with at least one aspect of self-care after discharge.

Health care institutions are increasingly focused on providing high-value care and preventing overuse. In this study, researchers developed a validated High-Value Care Culture Survey and found that administering the survey at two large academic medical centers provided health care leaders with an opportunity to target their improvement efforts.

… in the accuracy of PSIs, they have been widely employed as a quality metric. The implementation of ICD-10 and diagnosis timing codes necessitate development of a new set of PSIs. This consensus and validation study used a Delphi panel process to determine ICD-10 codes associated …

This commentary introduces the justifications for and processes being used to expand the current ICD program to map existing safety classification schemes, like the AHRQ common formats and the WHO taxonomy, to augment data collection of hospital-related harm.