Improving patient safety is one of the most highly publicized issues facing healthcare organizations. Regulatory, accreditation, and performance improvement groups such as The Joint Commission (formerly known as The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Institute for Safe Medical Practice (ISMP), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and others have published a wide range of mandates and recommendations to improve patient safety.

Robert M. Tobin, MD, PhD is a physician with the content development group at Zynx Health and builds our forecasting tools, including those for the IHI 5 Million Lives Campaign interventions. Read More

Healthcare providers must not only keep up with the changing guidelines, but also demonstrate improvements on a variety of performance measures.

How can organizations address programs such as The Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goals and the IHI 5 Million Lives Campaign?

Zynx solutions incorporate both The Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goals and the IHI 5 Million Lives Campaign interventions. Zynx solutions include strategies for implementation of these goals and tools to model the impact of patient safety interventions in a specific organization.

In what ways can organizations reduce the risk of medication errors?

Zynx order sets incorporate a number of IHI, ISMP, The Joint Commission, and FDA recommendations including:

• TallMAN lettering (eg, DOBUTamine versus DOPamine) of drug names that look alike or sound alike
• Avoidance of abbreviations as defined by the ISMP for dose unit, route, and frequency (eg, microgram/kilogram/minute intravenously)