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Patient Safety & Outcomes

Variation is the enemy of highly reliable healthcare. This was the crux of one of my favorite articles of the past couple years, Dr. Atul Gawande's "Big Med," which appeared in The New Yorker. It was also the leading topic…

Minor complications following ambulatory surgery — such as post-operative pain, nausea, vomiting and bleeding — occur at predictable rates. For example, vomiting occurs in 10 to 20 percent of patients, nausea in 10 to 40 percent and incisional pain in…

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Hospital-acquired pneumonia is predicable with a short list of risk factors, according to research published in the American Journal of Infection Control.

Patient education results in the greatest magnitude reduction of unnecessary emergency department use, though more studies are published investigating the effect of patient financial incentives and managed care on reducing unnecessary ED use, according to a study published in Academic…

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