Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit American academic medical center focused on integrated health care, education, and research. It employs over 7,300 physicians and scientists, along with another 66,000 administrative and allied health staff, across three major campuses: Rochester, Minnesota; Jacksonville, Florida; and Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona. The practice specializes in treating difficult cases through tertiary care and destination medicine. It is home to the top-15 ranked Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in addition to many of the highest regarded residency education programs in the United States. It spends over $660 million a year on research and has more than 3,000 full-time research personnel.
Dennis William Quaid is an American actor. He is known for his leading man roles in film and television. The Guardian named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health care provider.
Terminal illness or end-stage disease is a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and is expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer, dementia or advanced heart disease than for injury. In popular use, it indicates a disease that will progress until death with near absolute certainty, regardless of treatment. A patient who has such an illness may be referred to as a terminal patient, terminally ill or simply as being terminal. There is no standardized life expectancy for a patient to be considered terminal, although it is generally months or less. Life expectancy for terminal patients is a rough estimate given by the physician based on previous data and does not always reflect true longevity. An illness which is lifelong but not fatal is a chronic condition.
A medical error is a preventable adverse effect of care ("iatrogenesis"), whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailment.
Pharmacovigilance, also known as drug safety, is the pharmaceutical science relating to the "collection, detection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention" of adverse effects with pharmaceutical products. The etymological roots for the word "pharmacovigilance" are: pharmakon and vigilare. As such, pharmacovigilance heavily focuses on adverse drug reactions (ADR), which are defined as any response to a drug which is noxious and unintended, including lack of efficacy. Medication errors such as overdose, and misuse and abuse of a drug as well as drug exposure during pregnancy and breastfeeding, are also of interest, even without an adverse event, because they may result in an adverse drug reaction.
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events, often known as patient safety incidents, experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
A Patient Safety Organization (PSO) is a group, institution, or association that improves medical care by reducing medical errors. Common functions of patient safety organizations are data collection, analysis, reporting, education, funding, and advocacy. A PSO differs from a Federally designed Patient Safety Organization (PSO), which provides health care providers in the U.S. privilege and confidentiality protections for efforts to improve patient safety and the quality of patient care delivery
City of Hope is a private, non-profit clinical research center, hospital and graduate school located in Duarte, California, United States. The center's main campus resides on 110 acres (45 ha) of land adjacent to the boundaries of Duarte and Irwindale, with a network of clinical practice locations throughout Southern California, satellite offices in Monrovia and Irwindale, and regional fundraising offices throughout the United States.
John J. Nance is an American pilot, attorney, aviation and healthcare safety analyst, and author.
Peter J. Pronovost is Chief Quality and Transformation Officer at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, the main affiliate of the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. At UH, Pronovost is responsible for improving value across the health system, helping people stay well, get well and manage their most acute medical conditions. He is the clinical lead for population health and the lead for high-reliability medicine, with direct responsibility for the UH employee accountable care organization. He is also responsible for telehealth and virtual health programs serving patient and provider communities.
Fatal Care: Survive in the U.S. Health System is a book about preventable medical errors written by Sanjaya Kumar, president and chief medical officer of Quantros, Milpitas, California. Fatal Care was published in April 2008 by IGI Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Health information technology (HIT) is health technology, particularly information technology, applied to health and health care. It supports health information management across computerized systems and the secure exchange of health information between consumers, providers, payers, and quality monitors. Based on a 2008 report on a small series of studies conducted at four sites that provide ambulatory care – three U.S. medical centers and one in the Netherlands, the use of electronic health records (EHRs) was viewed as the most promising tool for improving the overall quality, safety and efficiency of the health delivery system.
Richard Davies deBronkart Jr, widely known as e-Patient Dave, is a cancer patient and blogger who, in 2009, became a noted activist for healthcare transformation through participatory medicine and personal health data rights.
Robert M. "Bob" Wachter is an academic physician and author. He is on the faculty of University of California, San Francisco, where he is chairman of the Department of Medicine, the Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine, and the Holly Smith Distinguished Professor in Science and Medicine. He is generally regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He and a colleague, Lee Goldman, are known for coining the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.
The inverse benefit law states that the ratio of benefits to harms among patients taking new drugs tends to vary inversely with how extensively a drug is marketed. Two Americans, Howard Brody and Donald Light, have defined the inverse benefit law, inspired by Tudor Hart's inverse care law.
Barcode technology in healthcare is the use of optical machine-readable representation of data in a hospital or healthcare setting.
Neel Shah is an American physician, Harvard University assistant professor, Chief Medical Officer of Maven Clinic, and founder of the nonprofit organizations Costs of Care and March for Moms. Shah is married to MIT Professor Julie Shah.
Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami: Bring Your Best Board is a made for television documentary that explores medical errors and waste in healthcare. It was broadcast globally on the Discovery Channel in 2012. It references federally-funded studies in the United States and news footage to support the claim that healthcare workers are afraid to speak up when medical errors occur in hospitals. The documentary covers solutions to preventable system failures causing harm. It aired four times on the Discovery Channel commercial-free in North America, Germany, the U.K., France, and other Western European countries including Sweden. It premiered at the National Press Club on April 27, 2012, after a short speech by Captain Sully Sullenberger who was featured in the film. The film was screened at the Texas Health Care Quality Improvement Awards on May 3, 2012.
The Medical Tactical Certificate Training Program, also known as Med Tac, is a global bystander rescue care training program that focuses on life-saving actions that can be performed by non-medical bystanders for the eight leading preventable causes of death to children, youth, and adults. In urban areas in the United States, professional first responders arrive at the scene of an emergency after approximately 10 minutes. Immediate rescue care by bystanders is most effective within three minutes of an event. Treatment within this time has been found to have a significant effect on rates of survival and permanent harm. Created and expanded upon after the dramatic increase in active shooter and terrorism events, Med Tac integrates the American Heart Association Heartsaver CPR/AED Training Program, or the American Red Cross equivalent training, and the Stop the Bleed Program sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security and American College of Surgeons.
