I came across this press release discussing the results of a study from Johns Hopkins Childrens Hospital that measured the effects of measuring quality in providing hospital care.

I found this interesting for two reasons:

1. There is a sense of holism across the entire study. All the actions that went into providing healthcare for a patient in the hospital were measured equally and the study was done both with numeric and free-text descriptions.
2. There is no passing the buck from nurses to doctors to pharmacists and a genuine interest in improving patient care.
3. The study isn’t just looking at quality itself, but also examines the quality of the quality and what impact it produces.

There were a couple of statements that really caught my eye here …

Miller emphasizes that error data are valuable only if consistently monitored for patterns and used to create safety checks that prevent common errors from happening again.

“Error reporting is only as good as the actual changes that are made as a result of it,” says co-author Christoph Lehmann, M.D., director of clinical information technology at the Children’s Center.

A good information quality effort in a large enterprise could learn a lot from these folks!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Information Quality, In the News, Practices, Understanding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.