"Change before you have to" is a famous quote attributed to Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric who was known for his aggressive and successful management style. Change doesn't just benefit industrial companies. Everyone benefits from change. Similarly, health care is constantly undergoing significant change to meet government standards, lower infection rates and it [...]

Don’t bring infection in from the outside Health care facilities consistently are filled with vendor employees performing necessary work. This includes elevator technicians, painters, flooring contractors, plumbers, electricians, cleaning crews, and more—and many of these contractors do not have functional knowledge of how their work can negatively affect an immune-compromised patient. Without proper training on [...]

  Five steps to mitigate the risk of infection Protecting personnel and facilities from unseen bacteria and fungi is a daunting task for building managers as well as professional cleaning teams. Industry researchers developed antimicrobials to destroy disease-causing microbes, the most common of which are antibiotics, which target bacteria. Recently, however, there has been antibiotic [...]

On March 21, 2016, providers added a new regulatory compliance assessment to their checklist of HIPAA accountability. The Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights announced the start of the Phase 2 HIPAA Audit Program to ensure that “policies and procedures adopted by covered entities and their business associates meet selected standards [...]

By Thom Wellington This first appeared in the August 2016 issue of DOTmed HealthCare Business News For the last four months, I have spotlighted different ideas in this column on how to reduce costly health care-acquired infections (HAIs). Each column began with statistics outlining the cost of HAIs both in lives and in dollars and [...]

  When healthcare facilities' staff and contractor employees are aware of infection problems and take specific steps to prevent them, healthcare-acquired infection rates can decrease by more than 70 percent. One in 25 hospital patients contracts a potentially fatal infection during the course of their hospital care. This life-threatening epidemic demonstrates the need for improved [...]