Quality Improvement Assignment
Americans spend the most money on health care but still, the United States ranks last in comparison to seventeen other developed countries, such as Germany, Japan, Australia, the U.K., Italy, Canada, China, France, Spain etc. The most common U.S. health care problems include extraordinary high chronic disease rates, poor coordination of care, absence of a primary care provider in most Americans, reducing amount of population receiving health care, inconvenient health care, improper payment to physicians in proportion to the quality of care they provide (in contrast to the U.K., Australia etc.), dissatisfaction of most of Americans with the current health care system etc. (Mercola.com, 2015).
But the most urgent problem concerns very frequent medical errors in the U.S. healthcare system. In fact, it is estimated that hospital errors appear to be the third leading death in the United States and cause more deaths than breast cancer, highway accidents, and AIDS combined.Back in 1999, the Institute of Medicine published a report, called “To Err is Human”, which stated that up to 98,000 Americans die every year because of medical errors. Although such number was initially disputable, that news was like a bombshell on the medical community. Already in 2010, this number raised almost twice. According to the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, errors in hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 Medicare patients a year. 2013 study, published in the Journal of Patient Safety, stated that these numbers are much higher, approximately 210,000-440,000 patients every year that go to the U.S. hospitals and suffer from some sort of preventable harm, which leads to their death (Allen, 2013).
Such disturbing statistics has been raising a lot of complaints and dissatisfaction of the U.S. population. For this reason, the stunningly high rates of medical errors in the U.S. have been in the focus of a number of medical researches for years. According to Chaiken & Holmquest (2003), around 500 companies and large health care purchasers get themselves involved in dealing with the issue. The group primarily focused on such three patient safety measures as developing computer physician order entry, intensive care unit (ICU) physician staffing, as well as the evidence-based referral. Inventing computerized physician order entry was intended to eliminate illegible orders and potentially preventable hospital errors they very often lead to. One of the core problems regarding medical errors was considered to be bad physician handwriting and clients’ misinterpretation of the medical prescriptions, a common way of physician-patient misunderstanding.
Thus, computerized physician order was supposed to cope with that issue. In practice, the number of medical errors was not even reduced, but on the contrary, gathered pace rapidly. Applying for evidence-based medicine at the certain point of care was intended to access the best clinical content available at the moment in order to make effective treatment decisions with no medical errors. However, so far the medical treatments change very quickly, new clinical content, delivered through evidence-based …
