Toshiba Grants Bolster Creative Safety Initiatives
When St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center, Lewiston, Maine, decided to renew its focus on CT quality and safety, the first step was developing a set of best practices upon which future improvements to CT workflow could be based. “We thought we could tap into the validated knowledge that resource centers had put together and actually implement those findings in the field,” explains Donna Knightly, RT, radiology supervisor. “Our objectives were dual: promoting the use of ACR appropriateness criteria and improving patient safety in any way that we could.”
In January 2009, AHRA: The Association for Medical Imaging Management, in conjunction with Toshiba, awarded three $7,500 grants to help fund innovative patient-safety and quality initiatives. St. Mary’s was a recipient, along with Washington Hospital Center, Washington, DC, and Jennie Edmundson Hospital, Council Bluffs, Iowa. “We have changed the way we engage patients. We now are more focused on being patient-centered and family-centered,” Knightly says. “It’s little things that make a big difference, like having a blanket warmer in the room. We just converted a warmer box that was used for contrast media, and we located this right in the scanner room so it’s easy to access for the technologist and they can keep the patient warm during the scan.”
Gayle Thompson-Smiley, director of Radiology at Washington Hospital Center, used her facility’s grant to initiate a patient-handoff program designed to refine the processes involved in transferring 300-350 patients a day from the hospital floor to the radiology department. “Washington Hospital Center is a very large institution and quite complex. In this type of environment, we’re also focused on how we can better improve the patient experience and the patient outcome,” she says. “This was a very unique opportunity for us.”
Meanwhile, Jim Lipcamon, director of Imaging Services at Jennie Edmundson Hospital, sought to leverage his hospital’s information systems to alert radiologic technologists to potential complications associated with contrast media for imaging. “People who take metformin [for type II diabetes] are contraindicated to receive iodinated contrast,” he explains. “We wanted to hardwire that process. Prior to the grant, that process was strictly on paper, relying on the patients to remember to tell their physician or tell the nurse on the floor. With the increase in obesity nationwide, we felt that this was a critical issue that needed to be addressed in our institution.”
Tom Kaiser, informatics pharmacist at Jennie Edmundson, is grateful for the interdepartmental collaboration fostered by the grant. “We’ve been able to use a multidisciplinary approach to our patient-safety enhancements,” he says. “It allowed me an opportunity to work with IT professionals, radiology professionals, and the pharmacy itself to come up with a program that generated rules based on patients’ medications.”
Washington Hospital Center is developing a CME course to train staff on successful handoff communications programs. “The CME event will help prepare physicians in our staff to really think about how best to keep patients safe in day-to-day care and in whatever handoff communication processes that they are involved with,” says Kathleen Srsic-Stroehr, senior nursing director for Evidence-based Practice and Quality. “It’s really important to think about those particular processes and those sender and receiver communication messages that are so important in a handoff communication situation.”
Knightly concurs: “This is a great opportunity for other departments in CT to tap into this knowledge and apply it to what they do every day out in the field. These best practices are very simple, very usable and make a difference in patient care and patient safety. It’s very exciting to be able to share what we’ve found and also to encourage people to use what’s out there.”
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Tags: CT, practices, radiology
Category: Future Technology, Medical Equipment, Medical Imaging —