THE PURSUIT OF EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE IS NOW AT the core of the agenda for improving health care in the United States. All major quality measurement systems use science-based indicators of proper processes of care, such as the ORYX measures of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Health Employer Data and Information Sets measures of the National Committee on Q...

In patient care today, teams of practitioners from various disciplines must coordinate their efforts in order to deliver care successfully. Frontline nurses and physicians must interact with social workers, therapists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and others to develop and carry out coordinated plans of care. Also, clinical team members must communicate with patients and their fam...

Tobacco dependence is the leading cause of death in persons with psychiatric and substance use disorders. This has lead to interest in the development of pharmacological and behavioral treatments for tobacco dependence in this subset of smokers. However, there has been little attention paid to the development of tobacco-free environments in psychiatric institutions despite the creation of smoke...

In 1995, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) expanded its patient rights standards to include requirements for assuring that hospital business practices would be ethical. Renamed “Patient Rights and Organization Ethics,” these standards are based on the realization that a hospital’s obligation to its patients is derived from two relationships: the patient-p...

The initial Standards by the JCAH (now the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, or JCAHO) required accredited hospitals to have organized medical staffs. The medical staff was responsible for overseeing the clinical practice and quality of care provided by physicians at the hospital. While recognizing the ultimate responsibility for patient care in a hospital is vested...

The present study investigates patient perceptions of the quality of discharge instruction by assessing inpatients' ratings of care and service in the United States over the past 5 years (1997-2001) (n = 4,901,178). As expected, patients' ratings of "instructions given about how to care for yourself at home" showed a strong, consistent positive relationship with overall patient satisfaction fro...

With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Advanced Wireless Services (AWS-3) auction of frequencies in the 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780MHz, and 2155-2180MHz bands, users of the Aeronautical Mobile Telemetry (AMT) band from 1755-1850MHz, known as Upper LBand, could be greatly affected. This paper takes an initial look at how the 1755-1780MHz band will be used by the cellular carriers and pres...

Benchmarking of clinical laboratory activities has become a tool used increasingly to enable administrators and managers to obtain an independent evaluation of the performance of the laboratory and identify opportunities for improvement. Benchmarking is particularly important because of the diversity and complexity of the various sections of the laboratory. The critical component of laboratory ...

In June 2003, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) recommended: "As a general policy, use air or FiO2 at < or =30% for open delivery (consistent with patient needs)" to prevent surgical fires. One way to interpret JCAHO's recommendation is that 100% O2 should not be indiscriminately used, and anesthesia providers should have the ability, consistent with pati...

Bioethics, clinical ethics, and professional ethics are mature, welldeveloped fields of applied ethics that focus on medical research, patient autonomy and patient care, patient– healthcare professional relationships, and issues that arise in clinical and other medical settings. However, despite these developments, little attention has been paid to the organizational aspects of healthcare in th...