The Joint Commission’s deadline for implementing Phase II of the National Patient Safety Goal on clinical alarm management is approaching January 1, 2016. In this month’s Soapbox, Clarice Balconi-Lamica of the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center shares how her facility assembled a core decision-making team to tackle the issue.
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Insufficiently processed endoscopes have risen to first place on ECRI Institute’s 2016 list of the top health technology hazards, bumping alarm hazards, the previous placeholder for at least 3 years running, to second place.
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Pressure is mounting for HTM departments to produce meaningful information from their CMMS databases. Effective HTM inventory management requires biomeds to expand their assumptions about how data can be used, as well as adopt new strategies to ensure accuracy and consistency.
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The clinical engineering community has been indoctrinated to believe there is a strong relationship between “high-risk” equipment and its need for so-called “preventive” maintenance. However, the fact that a particular piece of equipment could cause severe harm to a patient does not mean it also poses high risk if its failure probability is low.
Read MoreOn September 28, 2015, The Joint Commission issued a Sentinel Event Alert focused on preventing patient falls. According to the organization, since 2009 it has received 465 reports of patient falls with injuries; about 63% of those events resulted in death.
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