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Achieving diagnostic safety requires multidisciplinary approaches. Based on interviews with safety leaders across the United States, this article discusses how different organizations approach diagnostic safety. Respondents discuss barriers to implementing diagnostic safety activities as well as strategies to overcome barriers, highlighting the role of patient engagement and dedicated diagnostic safety champions.

Hospital readmission rates are an important indicator of patient safety. This cross-sectional study examined whether patients admitted to hospitals with high readmission rates also had higher risks of in-hospital adverse events. Based on a sample of over 46,000 Medicare patients with pneumonia discharged between July 2010 and December 2019 and linked to Medicare adverse event data, researchers found that patients admitted to hospitals with high all-cause readmission rates were more likely to experience an adverse event during their admission.

Parents have reported the importance of being involved in discussions with clinicians following adverse events involving their children. This study asked parents and physicians about their perspectives on inclusion of parents in morbidity and mortality (M&M) reviews. Similar to earlier studies, parents wished to be involved, while physicians were concerned that parent involvement would draw attention away from the overall purpose (e.g., quality improvement) of M&M conferences.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) use a variety of quality indicators to measure and rank hospital performance. In this study, researchers analyzed the variance between AHRQ pediatric quality indicators and CMS hospital-acquired condition indicators and evaluated the use of alternative composite scores. The researchers identified substantial within-hospital variation across the indicators and could not identify a single composite measure capable of capturing all of the variance observed across the broad range of outcomes. The authors call for additional research to identify meaningful approaches to performance ranking for children’s hospitals.

Teaching clinical reasoning to medical students is a key strategy for reducing diagnostic errors. This paper describes a new longitudinal clinical reasoning curriculum taught in a US medical school’s first and second year of medical training. Students reported high self-efficacy after completing the curriculum; however, a competency audit revealed room for improvement in including system-related aspects of care.

Handoffs between inpatient care settings represent a vulnerable time for patients. This qualitative study explores how team cognition occurs during care transitions and interprofessional handoffs between inpatient settings and the influence of sociotechnical systems, such as communication workflows or electronic heath record-based interfaces) influence team cognition. Participants highlighted how interprofessional handoffs can both enhance (e.g., information exchange) and hinder (e.g., logistic challenges and imprecise communication) team cognition.

Several factors contribute to the increased risk of prescribing errors for children, including weight-based dosing and drug formulation. This quality improvement project in one pediatric emergency department identified four key drivers and implemented four interventions to reduce errors. Prescribing errors were reduced across three plan-do-study-act cycles, and improvements were maintained six months after the final cycle.

Biases in decision support technologies precipitate racial inequities. This commentary discusses how algorithms in machine learning contribute to inaccuracies in the care of persons of color and the displaced. Legal actions to mitigate racial biases in decision making programs and implementation steps toward improvement are discussed.

Organizations such as The Joint Commission and the Leapfrog Group require participating healthcare organizations to evaluate their patient safety culture, but surveys can represent a time burden on staff. An Illinois health system aimed to lessen this burden on staff by creating a shorter, revised survey. The final survey consisted of five questions with comparable measurement properties of the original 17-question survey; however, the authors caution the shorter survey will yield less detail than the longer version.

Telehealth is increasingly used to connect rural hospitals with specialists in other areas and can improve patient outcomes. This study found that in situ simulation training in rural emergency departments resulted in small increases in the use of telemedicine for patients presenting with sepsis and led to improvements in sepsis process care outcomes.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued an opioid prescribing guideline intended to reverse the increasing death rate from opioid overdoses. This study describes the development, implementation, and effect of a safe prescribing strategy (TOWER) in an HIV-focused primary care setting. Providers using TOWER were more adherent to the CDC guidelines, with no worsening patient-reported outcome measures.

When serious adverse events such as death are reported, they are typically associated with poor patient safety. In some fields of care, however, such as palliative care, deaths are expected and not necessarily an indicator of poor quality. This commentary describes how serious and non-serious adverse events (SAEs/AEs) are currently defined and reported, the associated challenges, and proposes a new approach to reporting SAE/AE in clinical trials. A decision-tree to determine SAE/AE reporting based on the new proposed approach is presented.

A 2009 CMS Condition of Participation (CoP) requires that a director of anesthesia services assume overall responsibility for anesthesia administered in the hospital, including procedural sedation provided by nonanesthesiologists. This article reviews the CoP as it relates to procedural sedation, lays out a framework for implementing this role, and describes challenges of implementation in a large health system.