An acronym pulled from the alphabet soup is CQI, or Continuous Quality Improvement. Managers and quality improvement people use this to show that everything can be improved, even processes that work. Continuously trying to improve quality generates incremental improvements; rather than completely redesigning a process, it is changed in response ...

Nurses are often go-betweens for doctors and lab techs, speaking for either. For the laboratory, it usually doesn’t matter if the nurse represents the doctor (“He wants a STAT potassium on the patient in 12”), but is the reverse true? Recently, for example, a physician ordered a direct bilirubin that our chemistry analyzer reported with a ...

A certified diabetes educator (CDE) is a professional who is board certified to deliver education about diabetes-to the public, and especially to diabetics and their family. A CDE is supposed to be an expert on the basics of diabetes as well  as the latest trends in treatment and the most recent protocols from organizations like the American ...

Much was made of the President's ''beer summit'' last July, a meeting between a black professor and the white policeman who arrested him, something the Wall Street Journal labeled a ''teachable moment.'' Aside from wondering what kind of beer goes best with conflict resolution, I'd never heard the term. A teachable moment is that rare and ...

Barbara A. Centeno, MD, senior member and director of cytopathology, Moffitt Cancer Cente; and professor, University of South Florida College of Medicine, kicked off the general session with a discussion of diagnostic cytology of the exocrine pancreatobiliary tract. Part of Dr. Centano's presentation focused on understanding the cytological ...

As I was browsing some of the other ADVANCE blogs, I was struck by the commonality of themes between healthcare professions. It seems the different disciplines face many of the same issues (e.g., staffing problems, budget crunches, boosting productivity and morale), and many of the same fears (e.g., making an error that harms a patient, the ...

Remember when outsourcing did not apply to healthcare? Businesses developed the concept of contracting or otherwise arranging for some services to be performed outside the main business if it made financial sense. Outsourcing is utilizing experts from outside the entity to perform specific tasks the entity once performed itself, if those ...