Welcome to another HiQuiPS post! Our series has aimed to present foundational topics in Health informatics, Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in a practical manner. In this new section – Expert’s Corner, we ask an expert some important questions to deepen our understanding of these sciences and improve our implementation. For our inaugural Expert’s Corner post, we invited Dr. Kaveh Shojania. Dr. Shojania is the Vice Chair (Quality & Innovation) in the Department …
Teaching EBM? You can sim that!
If you’re in medicine, you’ve probably had to sit through at least one literature searching session. You were probably introduced to a long list of acronyms (most of which you’ve long forgotten) representing different literature databases. Perhaps you were asked to try out a search strategy in some of these databases, which you carefully assembled line by line. Did you ever wonder what the goal of these sessions were? Not sufficiently in depth …
Reporting Patient Safety Events in the Emergency Department
You are a physician caring for a 4-year-old patient in the Emergency Department (ED) presenting with a fever. Before ordering Acetaminophen for the patient, you check the patient’s weight on the emergency record, which you read as 17kg. You then write an order based on this weight. The ED nurse checks the order to see if the medication dose is safe using the hospital medication formulary. After that, the nurse approaches you and …
Taking a Sexual History in the ED
A complete sexual history is important in the investigation of several emergency department (ED) presentations. This is often challenging for students, as it can feel intimidating and uncomfortable to breach this topic with patients. Also, the setting of the ED is not inherently conducive to conversations like these, given the lack of established patient-staff rapport and perceived lack of privacy and time. As such, an organized approach with attention to the environment and …
Better Measurement in Quality Improvement
You are getting handover at the beginning of a shift in the emergency department (ED) and hear about a 71 year old woman who presented with a hip fracture. You’ve read about the benefits of nerve blocks for hip fractures, but still don’t feel prepared or supported to perform one. You text message a couple of colleagues and realize you are not alone. Others also understand that there are clear benefits, but don’t …
Human-Centered Design in Healthcare
You are working a busy shift in the emergency department and are trying to quickly disposition patients. As the shift progresses and your feet hurt, you wonder why your work space is far removed from the patient care area, and different walls have bins that contain order sets, handover notes, and referral forms. Moreover, the route to sending the tube to the lab crosses too close to the dirty utility room. You think …