Department of Emergency Medicine

Quality and Patient Safety

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Quality and Patient Safety

The members of the quality team review all of the final microbiology/serology reports to ensure that positive lab results are acted on appropriately. The quality team also reviews final radiology reports to ensure all acute and incidental findings are addressed. This often requires contacting patients and primary care doctors.

The Department of Emergency Medicine is working closely with the Department of Diagnostic Imaging to refine a system to categorize the severity of the diagnostic imaging findings. This tool will allows us to better track the appropriate management of these findings.

Quality Improvement

There are many quality markers that we are required by the federal government to track and report. These indicators are tied to public reporting, meaningful use- and value-based purchasing. In addition, we have added additional indicators to track and report internally to promote best practices in the treatment of heart attack, stroke, sepsis and trauma care. Using a variety of educational, decision support, protocols and feedback tools to address our entire care team, we have seen significant improvement in quality markers that have translated into improvement in meaningful survival. Our efforts have been recognized by the hospital, the health care system, and the joint commission.

Safety

We support our front line clinicians by learning from our shortcomings and looking for opportunities to create and apply system fixes to prevent and mitigate harm to our patients. We work closely with our medical directors at each of our sites to conduct event review and develop plans to reduce future adverse outcomes for our patients.