Improving Patient Safety: Improving Communication.

Communication among physicians, staff, and patients is a critical element in patient safety. Effective communication skills can be taught and improved through training and awareness. The practice of family medicine allows for long-term relationships with patients, which affords opportunities for ongoing, high-quality communication.

Improving Patient Safety: Prevention of Hospital Readmission.

Identifying and preventing avoidable hospital admissions have become cornerstone quality metrics that influence reimbursement and provision of quality care. Many initiatives focus on improving communication with other clinicians and patients, coordinating care after discharge, and improving care quality during the initial admission to prevent future readmissions. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services define a readmission as an admission to any acute care hospital for any reason within 30 days of discharge from an acute care hospital.

Improving Patient Safety: Care Transitions.

Care transitions are times of high risk of harm to patients. The transition from hospital care to outpatient care is perhaps the most well-studied transition and is encountered commonly in the family medicine setting. For discharge transitions, several hospital-based interventions for patients with major diagnoses have resulted in improvements in readmission rates, costs, and patient satisfaction.

Improving Patient Safety: Common Outpatient Medical Errors.

Medical errors are common and can lead to patient harm and death. Most research on errors has focused on inpatient care, yet errors are at least as common in the outpatient setting and likely are underreported. Common types of errors in the outpatient setting are diagnostic, drug, and testing errors.