Treatments don’t always work, mistakes happen, complications set in. Medical care can always get better, and University Hospital is among 10 hospitals looking for ways to improve through a surgical-care study.
In early November, U Hospital announced it would compare information with other hospitals to determine the most effective techniques.
Their project is modeled after a study conducted among 123 Veterans Affairs hospitals. When they compared results and applied techniques from the most successful hospitals across the board, post-operative illnesses decreased 43 percent. Deaths dropped 28 percent.
Because they serve mostly men, all of them veterans, VA hospitals do not resemble regular hospitals, according to Sean Mulvihill, chairman of the department of surgery.
So hospitals serving the wider community have adopted the idea, hoping to see what works best for them.
Like the VA hospitals, the U and other hospitals across the nation will track the surgery and care of their patients and compare results.
Traditionally, hospitals are hesitant to share information on patient outcomes.
“These hospitals are putting themselves out on a limb, saying ‘Let’s make it open,'” he said.
U Hospital will look at specific diagnoses for patients, length of their anesthesia, their status before surgery and other factors, said Mo Mulligan, director of performance monitoring and improvement.
“There is still a lot about medicine that we are learning every day,” she said.
When problems arise, it’s hard to say why, Mulvihill said.
An infection may come from the patient’s underlying disease or because antibiotics were not administered correctly.
“The latter thing is what we want to work on,” he said. “We’re concerned about how big a problem avoidable error is.”
The simple solutions are out there. Having both the patient and the surgeon initial the part of the body that is to be operated on is a highly effective way of preventing error, he said.
Sometimes patients are issued the wrong medication because of poor handwriting on the prescription. The answer may be an electronic order entry system.
“We have a lot of hope this will help us understand complications and do better for our patients,” Mulvihill said.