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Improving Heart Failure Care through Education
At Advocate Health Care, based in Oak Brook, Illinois (USA), the Heart Failure team recognized that teaching patients how to self manage this chronic illness is vital to improved quality of life and can have a significant impact on readmission rates.
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Health and Literacy Working Together
Mr. Archie Willard first learned to read as an adult and, at age 72, he still struggles daily with reading and writing. He's passionate about helping others and wants to create a safer, friendlier health delivery system. Now the co-chair of Iowa Health System's (Des Moines, Iowa, USA) Patient Safety Implementation Team, Mr. Willard wrote up this report of the two-day conference.
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Brief Report: National Nursing Home Improvement Collaborative Outcomes Congress
By Sharon Eloranta, a George W. Merck Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, describes the success of a National Nursing Home Improvement Collaborative which made great strides in reducing complications associated with nursing home care.
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Improvement Tip: "Quality" Is Not a Department
Robert Lloyd, Executive Director of Performance Improvement at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, offers some tips for improving quality within your organization.
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Donald Berwick's Acceptance Speech for the 2004 TRUST Award: Importance and Paucity of Trust in Today's Health Care System
In his speech accepting the 2004 TRUST Award from the Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET), an affiliate of the American Hospital Association, Don Berwick reflected on the importance and paucity of trust in today's health care system.
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How’s Your Health? Survey Tool Bringing Patients and Physicians onto the Same Page
A simple web-based health survey tool is proving remarkably useful to a wide variety of users, including patients and providers alike, with potential rewards not only in satisfaction but also cost savings and improved clinical outcomes.
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Improvement Tip: Ask "What Can We Do by Next Tuesday?"
A good tip for beginning an improvement project is to ask yourself "What can we do by next Tuesday?" Planning a small scale test very quickly will help set the tone for continuous and quick cycles of testing throughout the improvement process.
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Basketball and Health Care: Coaching Teams to Higher Performance
Göran Henriks (Jönköping County Council, Jönköping, Sweden) draws on his experience as a former basketball coach to lead hospital improvement teams to higher levels of performance.
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To Russia with Health Care Improvement
Pregnancy-induced hypertension, neonatal respiratory distress syndrome, and arterial hypertension were rampant in two Russian oblasts in 1998. But an improvement project has led to dramatic declines in these conditions, and is proving that such projects can create lasting change and be scaled to large regions.
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Spreading the Gift of Life: Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative
Seventeen people die on average every day in the US while awaiting an organ transplant. A national initiative called the Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative is attempting to change that statistic. Launched in 2003, the Collaborative has demonstrated that the supply of healthy organs available to patients in need could be increased by 50 percent.
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