Can a helpful suggestion or two improve sepsis mortality 45%? According to a published study in American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine May 2011, going down a check list of important actions helped decrease sepsis mortality.
the death rate was cut in half when the checklist was accompanied by residents who asked the attending physicians how to act on information related to matters such as antibiotic prescribing, ventilator use and central-line placement.
An AMA article interviewed the principle investigator, Curtis H. Weiss, MD. Nudging is the key.
…We’re designing an electronic checklist and plan to compare that to personal prompting.” Building the nudge into health information technology could have its own drawbacks, Dr. Weiss said. “My main concern with electronic prompting is alarm fatigue.
How do we overcome alarm fatigue?
What would be on your list of things to nudge about?
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…the new federal standards mark a shift in thinking toward improving the patient experience…
News article from the LA Times about Disney’s Building a Culture of Healthcare Excellence 3-1/2 day seminar for health care professionals. Patients are not customers but guests. Staff are “on stage.”
“If any [employee] happens to say something out of sorts or creates a bit of ill will with that patient, they may damn the entire hospital,”
Federal Standards? Click here
Courtesy of Disney
I encountered an interesting web article about NFL players and their approaches to memorizing the myriad of plays in the offensive or defensive schemes of thier football teams. This cause me to consider the myriad of facts that go into making daily clinical decisions. Hopefully we can learn from other professions how to memorize, envision, and to process quickly developing situations at hand
Here are the PubMed searches for Neonatology for April 2011
04/04/11
04/11/11
04/18/11
04/25/11
Our NNP group has 55-56 practitioners, full and part time. We use Amion.com as an electronic scheduling device. The schedulers put our schedule for 8-12 weeks at a time in the calendar but there are conflicts as people go through life. That means frequent schedule trading, day trades, night for day trades, and even facility switches. How do I keep up with the changes?
I subscribe to the electronic calendar that Amion provides and sync it to my Apple iCalendar and iPhone. Then when trades are made, the scheduler approves the trade and the schedule calendar is updated automatically to my calendar. I don’t have to write the dates in a book or type them into my desktop calendar or keep track of them. It is all done for me through subscription.
Amion syncs to Google Calendar, Apple iCal, iPhone, and Outlook 2007.
Baseball season has started. I love baseball. I collected baseball cards as a kid and spent time in the summer talking baseball and sats with my friends. I got a baseball encyclopedia for Christmas one year. All the facts and figures in my hand. Now, Mashup published a list of 10 Essential Mobile Apps for Baseball Fans.
At your place of business, what mashup would you like to see? Which widgets would you like on your desktop? That’s one of the critical questions to Decision Support in healthcare.
Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) is a required competency in many institutions. Certainly all that take care of pediatric patients. Most institutions have flowcharts and frequent reviews or simulation practice. PALS Advisor 2011 is an app you might wish to consider for your iPhone, iPod or iPad. Current Clinical Strategies Publishing is a book publisher of medical texts. They have moved printed into the digital.
I really like Wikipedia as a quick way to look up information. Often it gives me enough that I don’t have to continue searching other references. Yesterday in rounds we were talking about QT interval. Bazett and Fridericia were mentioned as formulas to correct QT interval for heart rate. I opened Wikipedia, entered Bazett correction (formula works as well) into the search box and:
The standard clinical correction is to use Bazett’s formula, named after physiologist Henry Cuthbert Bazett, calculating the heartrate-corrected QT interval QTc. Bazett’s formula is as follows:
Very nice, quick resource even with its limits.
