Background: Developing a domain ontology is a complex task. It is necessary to clarify domain concepts and the relationships between and among the concepts. Several taxonomies exit for the medical error domain. However, these taxonomies are divergent in granularity and asymmetry (assigning terms under different categories in different taxonomies). It is difficult to map concepts in different ta...

Introduction Medication errors stem from a variety of causes, including miscommunication between prescribers and pharmacists in the form of misunderstood and/or illegible abbreviations. The potential hazards of certain abbreviations started receiving heightened attention approximately twenty years ago. Most notably, as one of its National Patient Safety Goals, the then named Joint Commission on...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Primary stroke center (PSC) certification was established to identify hospitals providing evidence-based care for stroke patients. The numbers of PSCs certified by Joint Commission (JC), Healthcare Facilities Accreditation Program, Det Norske Veritas, and State-based agencies have significantly increased in the past decade. This study aimed to evaluate whether PSCs certif...

The concept “panic value” (or critical value) was first brought up by American scholar Lundberg[1] in 1972. It refers to the results of auxiliary examinations that are widely deviating from normal or anticipated results. The occurrence of these abnormal results shows that patients could be in a dangerous situation that their lives might be threatened. If clinicians are able to get the informati...

The standards set forth by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) Chapter 797 have now been in effect since January 1 or 2004. As the first practice standards of sterile pharmacy compounding in US history, they have "attracted both respect and criticism" because they have also been cited as a practice expectation by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. USP 797 expand...

Clinical communication failures caused 60% of sentinel events reported by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. The difficulties of communication have been the primary cause of errors leading to patients' death. For analyzing medical error events, uncovering the patterns of clinical communication, this paper reports the design and development of clinical communicati...

One of the innate qualities of all doctors is the desire to do what is best for the ailing patient. This quality then becomes an objective sought by all clinical physicians to improve medical standards as they tryto find better ways of delivering healthcare to their patients. Although incorporation of minimally invasive laparoscopic, robotic, and endo-operative techniques into mainstream care h...

CONTEXT The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) instituted a new regulation in 2006 to improve patient safety by decreasing medication errors. This requires a process for obtaining and documenting a complete list of each patient's current medications at hospital admission and communicating this list to the next clinician ("Medication Reconciliation"). OBJECTI...

Panel III reviewed the legal issues associated with managing child behavior in the dental setting. The first issue addressed was a review of the recent changes in informed consent for behavior management techniques in pediatric dentistry. Discussions focused on: (1) who should obtain informed consent; (2) who can give informed consent; and (3) what constitutes appropriate documentation. Recent ...