Patient Safety Resources
Where to go when you need to know.
CT Center for Patient Safety. Lisa Freeman, one of our members has done an extraordinary job in making sure our website is up to date. Lots of resources for the consumer. We are about to include a search engine on that site to improve navigation.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Provides comparative effectiveness research.
Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). IHI believes "that every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets, and only through continuous improvement of systems will we make a difference in the quality of health and health care the world over. Results for patients and communities define our success."
The Institute for Safe Medication Practices is devoted entirely to medication error prevention and safe medication use.
The Healthgrades website provides important hospital quality information.
By July of this year, working in collaboration with the Coalition on Aging, we will have a Connecticut Specific report on Long Term Care Facilities provided by the Informed Patient Institute.
We are very excited and you will be the first to see the report.
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Dear Members
Patient Safety Awareness Week is the first week in March. While we are seeing some important changes in the provision of safer care, change is not happening fast enough. The CT Hospital Association is working on improving care through high reliability work. Engineers from the aviation and nuclear industries are working with hospital staff in addressing the systemic failures that cause harm. The hospital CEOs have all agreed to make patient safety a priority. One sign of progress is that CTCPS and others are now being called upon to provide stories of harm and the impact of that harm to an individual and his or her family.
But what about the care in nursing homes, physician offices and independent surgical centers? What about the reliability of labs and diagnosis? How do our dialysis centers compare with other states?
We still have little or no access to data that would allow us to make the best, most informed decisions on our healthcare.
Our work at CTCPS continues. We will not stop until every resident of our state has the right, safest care at the right time.
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 Facility Fees Last week's announcement by the Connecticut Hospital Association that members take steps by March 1st to inform patients about "facility fees" when they receive care at hospital-owned medical offices was a step toward greater price transparency. But please remember to ask for the cost of all procedures. If you are having a procedure in a physician's office, you may well have to pay that facility fee. So while the hospital might tell you, that particular doctor's office might not. There are new fees and you, as the consumer, might be responsible for paying them.
With all of the changes taking place, that facility fee might well come out of your pocket. This is what happened to a family in Maine. When Michael Gove had an echocardiogram 14 months ago at a doctor's office in the Northpark Professional Building in Augusta, the bill was $658. His insurance policy paid it all. Some 14 months later, another echocardiogram done at Maine General Medical Center, after the doctor's office moved there, cost $2,319 and carried a $220.35 coinsurance bill for the Goves. The exact same procedure, in the same office, by the same tech, now cost nearly four times as much and the Goves were responsible for the difference.
Before you have a procedure performed in you physician's office, ask about the total cost. If you can find out the costs of cars, refrigerators, root canals and crowns, you have the right to find out how much money you will need to spend on a medical procedure. There might be alternatives - you need to know.
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State Report Card on Physician Quality
Connecticut gets an F
"Consumers should be able to find out if their local primary care physician is delivering good quality care without having to go through hoops," said Francois de Brantes, executive director of the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute in Newtown, CT which published the report." Connecticut has no public reporting of physician quality."
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Electronic Medical Records:
Do You Have A Story?
I want to hear your experience! To date I have heard only the physician experience: and they are complaining. But what about us, the patients and caregivers? After all, it is our health histories that are in those records.
Have you had a good or a bad experience? We would like to hear from you. Please go to our website at www.ctcps.org and fill out the contact form sharing your story. Thank you.
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