Quality Products & Resources

This column provides healthcare quality professionals with announcements of new products, with company contact information, and of recently released media, with ordering and Internet access information. It also gives up-to-the-minute descriptions of resources of interest to healthcare quality professionals as they navigate the constant flood of information.

Products

Prevention of laparoscopic surgical burns
Encision, Inc. has developed and patented a fail-safe technology called active electrode monitoring (AEM®), which makes laparoscopic surgery safer. The technology is delivered in the form of a new instrument fitted with a protective shield, which is continuously monitored during surgery. If a potentially dangerous level of electrosurgical energy is detected, the instrument sends a message to the generator and cuts power off to itself immediately.

Encision’s technology has been endorsed by multiple groups including the Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses, Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons, Baylor Medical Center, Mayo Clinic, Australia Health Department, and the OHIC Insurance Company.

For more information, visit Encision at www.encision.com.

Language interpretation services
CyraCom’s has announced an enhancement to its dual-handset telephones to enable caregivers to connect to more than 150 medically trained interpreters by simply saying the language needed. This advanced-speechrecognition technology allows for noticeably faster connections to over-the-phone interpretation services.

The caregiver simply says the name of the language desired aloud and a medical interpreter is available within seconds. The program recognizes a wide variety of pronunciations (e.g., the program responds to Spanish or
Español).

The product also allows for calls to be automatically lined up to interpreters based on historical usage and provides faster access to interpreters of languages most frequently needed by the facility. The average connection time to an interpreter is now 20 seconds compared to 45 seconds before product enhancements.

For more information, visit wwww.cyracom.com.

CT scanner
GE Healthcare has introduced its LightSpeed VCT System, its next-generation volume CT scanner. The scanner provides
image quality almost instantaneously for cardiovascular medicine, trauma, neurology, oncology, and other fields.

The LightSpeed VCT is able to capture the image of any organ in 1 second, scan the whole body in fewer than 10 seconds, and capture images of the heart and coronary arteries in fewer than five heartbeats. In a single rotation, the system creates 64 submillimeter images, totaling 40 millimeters of anatomical coverage, which are combined to form a 3-dimensional view of the patient’s anatomy for the physician to analyze.

For more information, visit www.gehealthcare.com.

Diagramming software
SmartDraw is helping hospitals improve quality and provide documentation for Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations inspections. This diagramming software comes with more than 50,000 symbols and templates, including more than 3,000 for the medical community. It also features drag-and-drop drawing and symbol collections for quality and process improvement.

For more information, visit www.smartdraw.com.

Privacy monitor
3M Touch Systems, Inc., has designed the 3M Privacy Monitor to help organizations comply with U.S. legislation about data confidentiality in financial and healthcare communities. The monitor provides confidential viewing using unique film technology.

Available in 17-inch diagonal size, the monitor integrates proprietary Vikuiti Light Control Film from 3M into an LCD monitor for the first time to deliver a product that protects sensitive onscreen data from the eyes of the casual observer. The “microlouver technology” within the film structure reduces the horizontal viewing area of the LCD to 60(o). Persons directly in front of the monitor have an unobstructed view of displayed information. But from either side, observers see only a dark, blank screen.

The privacy film technology also shields out unwanted ambient light, offering glare reduction and contrast enhancement.

For more information, visit www.3Mtouch.com/info/pr.

Resources

Developed by the AHRQ-sponsored Evidence-Based Practice Center at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, the tool is based on several key principles, including the need to plan drill objectives, train observers, document drill activities, and debrief all participants. The tool’s evaluation modules are designed to capture all phases of drill activities, such as planning and recording activities in each area of the hospital including incident command, decontamination, triage, and treatment. The tool also includes four supplemental forms to help hospitals customize their drills to practice response to specific health threats such as a bio-terrorism incident.

The CD-ROM version of the modules includes a spreadsheet to help compile responses from the modules and compare data on topic such as how the hospital performs on repeat exercises, how different parts of the hospital performs, or how different hospitals perform when participating in the same drill. The tool includes instructions on how to use the modules when planning and executing the evaluation of hospital disaster drills.

Evaluation of Hospital Disaster Drills: A Module-Based Approach is available on the AHRQ Web site at www.ahrq.gov/research/hospdrills/hospdrill.htm or by contacting the AHRQ Public Affairs Office at 301/427-1271.

Overview of children’s healthcare
The Commonwealth Fund recently released a new overview of children’s healthcare titled Quality of Health Care for Children and Adolescents: A Chartbook. This overview provides a number of advances in children’s healthcare and improved outcomes on a series of measures while noting that up to three quarters of children and adolescents are not receiving scientifically proven or recommended care.

Sheila Leatherman, research professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, and Douglas McCarthy, president of Issues Research, Inc. produced this report, compiling information from a review of 500 studies. The report includes 40 charts and commentary on the quality of care received in numerous categories including, preventive care and treatment of chronic conditions. The report’s charts are broken into areas similar to those outlined in the Institute of Medicine report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, which outlined goals for improvement in the healthcare system generally. Areas included are the following:

• Effectiveness—staying healthy
• Patient safety
• Access to care and patient-centeredness of care
• Disparities
• Examples of improvement

“As a society, we often think of children as little adults. But they aren’t,” stated McCarthy. “Their unique developmental needs, different disease patterns, and dependency on adults mean that quality of healthcare for children deserves special attention. This report is a start.”

A printable version of Quality of Health Care for Children and Adolescents: A Chartbook is available at www.cmwf.org or by contacting Linda Loranger, Janet Firshein, or Kari Root at 301/652-1558.

Nursing home: A system in crisis report
According to a “snapshot” report prepared by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), more than one-third of California’s freestanding nursing homes did not meet the state’s minimum staffing standards. The report, Nursing Homes: A System in Crisis was released June 2004. Although more homes met the minimum standard in 2002 than 2001, the low staffing levels contributed to more than two-thirds of the staff in California’s nursing homes leaving their jobs in 2002.

The low staffing and high turnover rates were important contributing factors to poor quality care and resulted in an increase in complaints between 2000 and 2002. The CHCF report found that the most common measures of poor quality—weight loss, left in bed all the time, and the use of physical restraints—continued to be serious problems in 2002.

In addition to staffing ratios and turnover rates, this report provides statewide information on quality care such as occupancy rates, complaints filed, resident demographics, inspection visits, payment sources and the
industry’s financial status.

A downloadable version of Nursing Homes: A System in Crisis is available at www.chcf.org.

Priority areas for national action
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies released a new report listing 20 priority areas that should be the focus of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other public and private stakeholders in the drive to improve healthcare quality and delivery for all Americans. Collectively, these areas could help transform the entire healthcare system.

The committee that wrote the report developed and used an 8-step process to select 20 areas, which range from broad interventions to preventive services to palliative care and dying. The selection process employed three criteria: the breadth of impact on patients and communities, improvability, or the likelihood of closing large quality gaps, and inclusiveness, which deals with both the diversity of people affected and the likelihood of improvement and positive effects throughout the healthcare industry.

The 20 domains identified should serve as a starting point to dramatically increase the level of quality across the board, according to the report, which is part of the IOM series of recent studies on healthcare quality in America. In the selected areas, low-quality care typically does not result from a lack of effective treatments, but from inadequate systems to carry them out.

This 160-page report, Priority Areas for National Action: Transforming Health Care Quality, may be read online at www.nap.edu at no charge or purchased through the National Academies Press for $32.00 at the same Web address.

Susan Yeager-Chowning is the chief learning officer at Saint Luke’s Health System, Kansas City, MO. Yeager-Chowning is a CPHQ and holds two masters’ degree—in medical microbiology and immunology and in business administration. She has been in the field of quality improvement since 1993. She has served as a Missouri Quality Award examiner and a Missouri Team Quality Award judge. She also is a member of the JHQ Review Panel.

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