Supporting Error Management and Safety Climate in Ambulatory Care Practices: The CIRSforte Study.

Background: To improve patient safety, it is important that healthcare facilities learn from critical incidents. Tools such as reporting and learning systems and team meetings structure error management and promote learning from incidents. To enhance error management in ambulatory care practices, it is important to promote a climate of safety and ensure personnel share views on safety policies and procedures.

Strength of Safety Measures Introduced by Medical Practices to Prevent a Recurrence of Patient Safety Incidents: An Observational Study.

Objective: The aim of this study was to analyze the strength of safety measures described in incident reports in outpatient care.

Methods: An incident reporting project in German outpatient care included 184 medical practices with differing fields of specialization. The practices were invited to submit anonymous incident reports to the project team 3 times for 17 months.

[The analysis of CIRSmedical.de using Natural Language Processing].

Background: CIRSmedical.de is a publicly accessible, cross-institutional reporting and learning system, which is organized by the German Agency for Quality in Medicine (ÄZQ). CIRSmedical.

The WHO High 5s project: medication reconciliation in a German university hospital. A prospective observational cohort study.

Background: Ensuring medication accuracy during transitions in care is one of the five highly prevalent patient safety problems focused on within the World Health Organization High 5s Project. Medication reconciliation is a standardized patient care process that can be used to address this problem. The aim of the current study is to implement medication reconciliation in a German university hospital.

Standardization in patient safety: the WHO High 5s project.

Quality Problem: Despite its success in other industries, process standardization in health care has been slow to gain traction or to demonstrate a positive impact on the safety of care.

Intervention: The High 5s project is a global patient safety initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) to facilitate the development, implementation and evaluation of Standard Operating Protocols (SOPs) within a global learning community to achieve measurable, significant and sustainable reductions in challenging patient safety problems.

Goals: The project seeks to answer two questions: (i) Is it feasible to implement standardized health care processes in individual hospitals, among multiple hospitals within individual countries and across country boundaries? (ii) If so, what is the impact of standardization on the safety problems that the project is targeting?

Method: The two key areas in which the High 5s project is innovative are its use of process standardization both in hospitals within a country and in multiple participating countries, and its carefully designed multi-pronged approach to evaluation.

[After 15 years of ÄZQ: 10 years of safety for patients].

The German Agency for Quality in Medicine (ÄZQ) has been actively addressing the topic patient safety for ten years. ÄZQ's work in the field has focused on establishing a patient safety expert circle, publishing various articles on the subject, developing a patient safety continuing education curriculum, setting up a patient safety internet forum, and participating in the WHO initiative "Action on Patient Safety: High 5s". Furthermore, "CIRSmedical.

[A proposal of the medical profession for the prevention of medical errors].

In 2002 the Agency for Quality in Medicine developed an "action plan" to improve patient safety that can be summarized neatly as "Sensitize, inform, discuss and implement strategies". The following publication describes both the goals of this action plan and some of its implemented measures.

[The German program for disease management guidelines: evaluation by use of quality indicators].

The Program for National Disease Management Guidelines (German DM-CPG Program) in Germany aims at the implementation of best-practice recommendations for prevention, acute care, rehabilitation and chronic care in the setting of disease management programs and integrated health-care systems. Like other guidelines, DM-CPG need to be assessed regarding their influence on structures, processes and outcomes of care. However, quality assessment in integrated health-care systems is challenging.

MedIEQ-Quality labelling of medical web content using multilingual information extraction.

Quality of Internet health information is essential because it has the potential to benefit or harm a large number of people and it is therefore essential to provide consumers with some tools to aid them in assessing the nature of the information they are accessing and how they should use it without jeopardizing their relationship with their doctor. Organizations around the world are working on establishing standards of quality in the accreditation of health-related web content. For the full success of these initiatives, they must be equipped with technologies that enable the automation of the rating process and allow the continuous monitoring of labelled web sites alerting the labelling agency.

[Clinical practice guidelines in Germany, 1994 to 2004. From guideline methodology towards guideline implementation].

The role of clinical practice guidelines (CPG) as a tool for continuous medical education (CME), and quality management in health care is now widely accepted in Germany. Since the 90ies, the physicians' professional associations as well as health care authorities and parliament have been introducing several incentives and regulations in order to promote the use of evidence based CPG. In the past German CPG agencies have been focussing their work on developing and optimising methodological CPG standards.

[Quality management in health care: error prevention and managing errors in medicine].

Background: About 3.7% of in-house-treated patients in Switzerland, the USA and Australia are victims of treatment-related health problems which probably are related to avoidable "adverse events" in more than 50% of the occurrences. Reasons are primarily systematic incidents, e.