Category: Health care

The future Healthcare Learning Landscape – a 10,000 foot view

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The field of Healthcare today is filled with opportunities for improvement. Inconsistent treatment, preventable illness, and medical errors that result in injury are all too common, along with enormous inefficiency and waste.

The Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is leading an initiative that descibes a better organizing principle for healthcare – a “Learning Healthcare System.” A learning healthcare system is simply one that continuously “Learns,” meaning that healthcare data from many sources, including electronic medical records is turned into guidelines and knowledge and that knowledge is swiftly translated into practice so that all clinical decisions and processes are based on the best available and most current evidence. New knowledge is in turn generated in the course of practice, and the cycle continues, fostering continuous improvement at all levels: national, organizational, unit, team and individual.

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Progress in the fight against Hospital Acquired Infections

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The problem:

Over the last few years, public attention has been focused increasingly on the problem of nosocomial or hospital acquired infections (HAI’s). Why is there so much concern? A study by the CDC published in the March/April 2007 issue of the journal Public Health Reports, estimated that 1.7 million hospital patients per year ― 4.5 of every 100 admissions ― become infected, causing or contributing to the deaths of nearly 100,000 people per year. (IHI.org) 100,000 people per year is about 1/5 of the total deaths from cancer per year in the US, or about the same as the total stroke or accidental deaths. Or, another way to understand the size of this number, picture the population of South Bend Indiana, dying every year of mostly preventable causes. This is an epidemic.

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Virtual Cardiac Arrest Cart Treasure Hunt game: Adapting the game to your needs

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A while back I wrote [LINK] about a treasure-hunt-style game we developed in-house for training purposes. The purpose of the game is to help healthcare professionals memorize the location of items stored within a cardiac arrest cart, to make things go smoothly when every second counts.

A cardiac arrest cart (or “crash cart”) is a red metal tool cabinet, filled with items like airway tubes, IV needles, masks and other supplies used in advanced cardiac life support. The goal of this game is to learn where all the items are by retrieving the requested item from the cart by opening drawers, then dragging the item to a target for checking.

VIEW DEMO of the Virtual Cardiac Arrest Cart

DOWNLOAD SOURCE files for the cart game.

Game play

  1. When the game loads, a cardiac arrest cart stands off to the left. A specific item is chosen at random and requested in a message toward the bottom of the screen.
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What Caused the Flu Vaccine Shortage?

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I did a little research into why we now only have two (no, make that one!) suppliers of flu vaccine for the entire US, and why that supply is available only through the government. If the authors quoted below are correct, perhaps current policy needs to be revised.

I’ve heard various politicians and administrators lately (most recently Tommy Thompson) telling us how the flu vaccine shortage is not a public health problem, and people questioning how dangerous the flu can be. I have to disagree with them – for anyone who has asthma or respiratory diseases, or simply doesn’t have a lot of defense against the flu, ithe possibility of getting a bad case of the flu can be a pretty scary prospect.

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