Quality Benchmark Project: Description & Due Dates, Broad Overview

  Research & Decide. Choose and begin researching a significant quality issue. It can be anything that you believe is vital to patient safety and/or improving overall quality of care. Reliable research needs to be less than 5 years old ideally. The best research are peer-reviewed journal articles, or are written by respectable organizations and expert professionals. Some topic examples may include: • Hand hygiene, to include nosocomial infections driving healthcare costs • Medication errors, to include transcription errors or staffing issues. How does fixed hospital budgets fit in? • Patient falls, to include alarm fatigue or short hospital stays – Who pays the cost if a patient falls while in the hospital? • Bed sores acquired in the hospital. Who pays if the patient gets a bed sore while at the hospital? • Misdiagnosis and how that affects short and long-term patient care. How does that affect healthcare costs? • Issues with patient identification – may tie into treatment errors and billing issues. • Documentation quality and how it negatively affects reimbursement and drives hospital costs. • Budget costs limiting up-to-date technology or research-based interventions from being implemented. • Inter-departmental communication, to include nursing triage and efficient, safe decision-making. Consider if this is an effective use of time management and how it can be improved.