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Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | July 22, 2014
However, not all of the medication orders that were tested with the evaluation tool gave appropriate warnings for orders that would have caused a patient harm. “We are finding that they are working a lot better and there are fewer errors than what they saw several years ago, but there are still a fairly significant number of potential errors that are not being caught by the systems,” said Mobley.
She said that it’s really important that hospitals continue to refine their systems and get them tested every year to make sure they're working as well as they can.
The survey also showed that there were large differences in the estimated survival rates for high-risk procedures as well as hospital-acquired injury and infection. For instance, the predicted mortality rate varied five-fold for esophagectomies and six-fold for abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.
Only 232 out of the 1,037 hospitals had zero hospital-acquired injuries – the average rate was 0.521 injuries per 1,000 inpatient discharges. Six hospitals had a rate of more than five injuries.
One in six hospitals had a higher number of infections than they were expected to from central lines and one in 10 did a poor job preventing urinary tract infections.
Leapfrog has a standard for the amount of patients in ICUs who should be cared for by intensivists or physicians who are certified in critical care medicine. The standard states that one should be in the ICU at least eight hours a day, seven days a week and when they are not in the ICU, they should respond to pages within five minutes or have another health care professional reach the patient within that time.
The survey showed that 41.7 percent of the hospitals fully met the standard, which was a 3 percent increase from 2012. However, since it’s so important that ICUs are adequately staffed, Leapfrog believes that there hasn’t been enough progress.
“We really want people to be aware that a lot of hospitals don’t have the level of staffing that can reduce mortality in the ICU,” said Mobley.
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