Healthcare standardization

The SHPA Standards of Practice for Clinical Pharmacy are used as a reference point for benchmarking the provision of clinical pharmacy services in hospitals in Australia. An independent not-for-profit organization, the Australian Council of Healthcare Standards (ACHS), accredits healthcare organizations... 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains Web pages of statistical data for testing software. Direct your Web browser to http //chetnistry.brookscole.com/skoogfac/. From the Chapter Resources menu, choose Web Works, and locate the Chapter 6 section. Here you will find a link to the NIST site. Browse the site to see what kinds of data are available for testing. We use two of the NIST data sets in Problems 6-21 and 6-22. Find the software diagnostics site for the Healthcare Standards Roadmap Project. Describe why the project is needed and the NIST approach. 

ECRI. Healthcare Standards Official Directory. ECRI, Plymouth Meeting, PA, 1999. 

A comprehensive hsting of healthcare standards and the issuing organizations is presented in the Healthcare Standards Directory published by ECRI. The Directory is well organized by keywords, organizations and their standards, federal and state laws, legislation and regulations, and contains a complete index of names and addresses. 

Gorski, J., Jarz bowicz, A., Miler, J. Validation of services supporting healthcare standards conformance. Metrology and Measurements Systems X1X(2), 269-282 (2012)... 

Pharmacopoeia publications provide a final important source of information for the pharmaceutical industry, regulatory authorities, and the healthcare professions. These are concerned with establishing quality standards. These publications include monographs that define specifications for the purity and identity of established pharmaceutical ingredients, both active and non-active, together with recognised analytical methods that may be used to evaluate them. The most relevant are the United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) and the European Pharmacopoeia (Ph.Eur). 

Comparisons between Enropean stndies are also difficult. Tolley and Gyldmark (1993) reviewed costs of treatment, care, and support for HIV-positive and AIDS patients in eleven Enropean conntries, which were based on data from the second half of the eighties. The anthors inflated cost fignres to 1990 prices and converted them from local currency to US by using national healthcare-specific price indices and health-specific purchasing power parities. The standardized cost estimates ranged between US 1,700 (social care per HIV-positive) and US 28,200 (hospital care per AIDS person-year), with the exception of a Greek study, which produced an adjusted cost estimate for the hospital treatment and care of AIDS patients of US 70,400 per person-year. 

Albright PS, Livingstone S, Keegan DL (1996). Reduction of healthcare resource utilisation and costs following the use of risperidone for patients with schizophrenia previously treated with standard antipsychotic therapy a retrospective analysis using the Saskatchewan Health Linkable Databases. Clin Drug Invest 11,289-99. 

NCCLS, National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards provides a medium for communication among professionals in healthcare, government, and industry in developing guidelines for clinical laboratory practices. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has incorporated pneumococcal and influenza immunization rates into some of their quality standards. Patients admitted to a hospital for community-acquired pneumonia should be screened for, offered, and vaccinated with pneumococcal and influenza vaccines prior to discharge if not previously administered. In physicians office practice, all persons over 65 years of age who have been hospitalized in the past year should be screened for, offered, and vaccinated with pneumococcal and influenza vaccines if not previously administered. Both of these standards will affect payment if the standard is not met. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has also incorporated these standards into their accreditation reviews of health care facilities. 

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations standards require a nutrition screening typically within 24 to 72 hours of hospital admission. Patients determined not to be at risk for malnutrition should be reevaluated every 7 to 14 days. Patients determined to be at risk for malnutrition need a nutrition assessment and care plan. 

Isolation Procedures Once a victim of chemical or biological agents or weapons gets to the hospital or another healthcare facility, that person may have to abide by patient isolation procedures. These include Standard Precautions, Airborne Precautions, Droplet Precautions, and Contact Precautions. These precautions are spelled out in the third edition of Medical Management Of Biological Casualties Handbook published by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease located at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. 

Decontamination Soap and water, or diluted sodium hypochlorite solution (0.5 percent) for environmental contamination. Drainage and secretion procedures are necessary. Standard precautions for healthcare workers should be followed. Person-to-person transmission via tissue transplantation and sexual contact has been reported but are insignificant. 

Decontamination Standard Precautions for healthcare workers. Person-to-person airborne transmission is not likely, although secondary cases may occur through improper handling of infected secretions. Environmental decontamination can be treated with 0.5 percent hypochlorite solution. 

Regarding isolation and decontamination, Standard Precautions are recommended for healthcare personnel. Person-to-person transmission is rare. Victims exposed to Q fever by aerosol do not present a risk for secondary contamination or re-aerosolization of the organism. Decontamination can be done with soap and water, or a 0.5 percent chlorine solution on personnel. 

Medical Management Standard Precautions are recommended for healthcare personnel. Most cases of acute Q fever will eventually resolve without antibiotic treatment, but all suspected cases of Q fever should be treated to reduce the risk of complications. 

The minimum standards for the facilities in which clinical pharmacology studies should be conducted are described in ABPl guidelines. Clearly, the same standards should apply to all organisations involved in conducting studies. In the United Kingdom, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has instituted inspection of facilities and procedures, and a system of certification is in place. 

Within the last 20 years or so, three major features of controlled clinical trials, in particular, have permitted significant advances in deciding whether treatments are of value or not randomisation, systematic review and metaanalysis, and the concept of the large-scale, simple (to understand and conduct) randomised trial in areas where only moderate benefits can be expected.All of these elements are likely to underpin future trials for purposes of regulation, pharmacoeconomics and healthcare policy. Yet there is no room for complacency or allowing standards to slip. Systematic reviews of some... 

Fundamental healthcare issues may also be involved in the situation of policy-driven therapeutic research. The future investment of society in health may require a large-scale national clinical trial to answer questions relating to the prevention of disease or premature death. This type of clinical trial will not simply relate to one manufacturer s product. As such, it is preferable that the trial is organised on a national level, not necessarily with the exclusion of the company(s) involved. An independent data-monitoring committee (IDMC) should oversee the clinical trial with as much support from the pharmaceutical company(s) as possible. The clinical data collected belongs to the state and should be treated with the same quality standards as any pharmaceutical company sponsored study. 

By 1996 over 500,000 coronary interventions were performed annually, which has more than doubled to today s current standard. These pioneers have paved the way for interventional procedures that now serve as the standard of care for symptomatic coronary artery disease. While coronary intervention remains in its adolescent stage, the quality of care has increased substantially and the bar is ever increasing as to the extent coronary interventions play in our society s healthcare. 

Protein concentration is measured by using the 2D Quant Kit (GE Healthcare UK Ltd.) with bovine serum albumin as the standard and adjusted to 10 pg/pL at a pH of 9. 

Like many organizations today, the USP has a mission statement and this was stated in the 27th edition the objective of a pharmacopoeia is to provide and disseminate authoritative standards for medicines, other healthcare technologies and related practices to maintain and improve public health, and to provide information for practitioners and patients. In addition, the compendial activities of the USP are also designed to support the availability of safe and good quality medicines for consumers everywhere. In parenthesis, the term quality is not defined here because it is intuitively understood by everyone. One working definition holds that a quality item is one suitable for a stated purpose, but this is somewhat unsatisfactory and a better definition is required. 

Acylcarnitine analysis using stable-isotope-labeled internal standards provides quantitative data for acylcarnitine species [14]. However, to provide meaningful results to referring healthcare providers, it is critical to complement analytical proficiency with in-depth interpretation of results, as is true for many other examples of complex metabolic profiles [39]. 

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