Improving Safety During Transitions of Care Through the Use of Electronic Referral Loops to Receive and Reconcile Health Information.

Background: Medicare's Promoting Interoperability Program evaluates how often organizations completely reconcile differences between the internal medical record with problems, medications, and allergies received from outside electronic health records (EHRs) during hospitalizations. This quality improvement project sought to increase rates of complete reconciliation of patient problems, medications, and allergies to 80% of hospitalizations for 90 consecutive days at all eight hospitals in an academic medical system by December 31, 2021.

Methods: Baseline characteristics were determined using monthly reconciliation performance from October 2019 to October 2020.

A quality improvement framework for equity in cardiovascular care: results of a national collaborative.

Disparities in the quality of cardiovascular care provided to minorities have been well documented, but less is known about the use of quality improvement methods to eliminate these disparities. Measurement is also often impeded by a lack of reliable patient demographic data. The objective of this study was to assess the ability of hospitals with large minority populations to measure and improve the care rendered to Black and Hispanic patients.

Isolation of Acinetobacter baumannii complex and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus from hospital rooms following terminal cleaning and disinfection: can we do better?

Objective: To study the frequency of isolation of Acinetobacter baumannii complex (ABC) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from surfaces of rooms newly vacated by patients with multidrug-resistant (MDR) ABC following various rounds of routine terminal cleaning and disinfection (C/D) with bleach or 1 round of C/D followed by hydrogen peroxide vapor (HPV) treatment.

Setting: A 900-bed tertiary care hospital.

Methods: ABC and MRSA cultures were obtained from hospital rooms including 312 rooms (mean, 18.

Is it Clostridium difficile infection or something else? A case-control study of 352 hospitalized patients with new-onset diarrhea.

Background: Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea (CDAD) is a leading cause of nosocomial diarrhea in the United States, and may be associated with significant morbidity and occasional mortality. Diarrhea is also very common among hospitalized patients and is often related to a variety of factors not related to C difficile infection.

Methods: We performed a retrospective case-control study at a tertiary care community medical center to delineate factors that are predictive of CDAD among hospitalized patients with new-onset diarrhea (ie, not present at the time of admission).

Self-assessment of cultural and linguistic competence in an ambulatory health system.

The University Health System (UHS) leaders organized a comprehensive planning process of its ambulatory care system. As part of this planning process, UHS assessed the cultural and linguistic competence of its outpatient environment. This assessment was conducted within the context of standards outlined in the U.