Medical and health activities can greatly benefit from the effective use of health informatics. By capturing, processing, and disseminating information to the correct systems and processes, decision-making can be more successful and quality care and patient safety would see significant improvements. The Handbook of Research on Patient Safety and Quality Care through Health Informatics highlights current research and trends from both professionals and researchers on health informatics as applied to the needs of patient safety and quality care. Bringing together theory and practical approaches for patient needs, this book is essential for educators and trainers at multiple experience levels in the fields of medicine and medical informatics.

Describes and analyzes recent breakthroughs in healthcare and biomedicine providing comprehensive coverage and definitions of important issues, concepts, new trends and advanced technologies.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

Patient safety and quality of care are critical concerns of healthcare consumers, payers, providers, organizations, health systems, and governments. Although a strong body of knowledge shows that high reliability methods enable the most efficient, safe, and effective care, these methods have yet to be completely implemented across healthcare. According to authors Cynthia Oster and Jane Braaten, nurses—who are on the frontline of providing safe and effective care—are ideally situated to drive high reliability. High Reliability Organizations: A Healthcare Handbook for Patient Safety & Quality, Second Edition, equips nurses and healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to establish an error detection and prevention system. This new edition builds on the foundation of the first book with best practices, relevant exemplars, and important discussions about cultural aspects essential to sustainability. New material focuses on: · High reliability performance during a pandemic · Organizational learning and tiered safety huddles · High reliability in infection prevention and ambulatory care · The emerging field of human factors engineering within healthcare · Creating a virtual resource toolkit for frontline staff

Patient Safety: Perspectives on Evidence, Information and Knowledge Transfer provides background on the patient safety movement, systems safety, human error and other key philosophies that support change and innovation in the reduction of medical error. The book draws from multidisciplinary areas within the acute care environment to share models that support the proactive changes necessary to provide safe care delivery. The publication discusses how the tenets of safety (described in the beginning of the book) can be actively applied in the field to make evidence, information and knowledge (EIK) sharing processes reliable, effective and safe. This is a wide-ranging and important book that is designed to raise awareness of the latent risks for patient safety that are present in the EIK identification, acquisition and distribution processes, structures, and systems of many healthcare institutions across the world. The expert contributors offer systemic, evidence-based improvement processes, assessment concepts and innovative activities to identify these risks to minimize their potential to adversely impact care. These ideas are presented to create opportunities for the field to design and use strategies that enable meaningful implementation and management of EIK. Their thoughts will enable healthcare staff to see EIK as a tangible element contributing toward sustainable patient safety improvements.