Medication Safety and Cost Recovery: a Four-Step Approach for Executives - Book Review

AORN Journal, Feb, 2004 by Anne Marie Herlehy

Chip Caldwell and Charles R. Denham 2001, 174 $68 paperback

In late 1999, the Institute of Medicine released the report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which identified a magnitude of problems involving patient safety. The report reinforces the obvious: Errors are not caused by careless people but are the result of multiple complex and interconnected system failures. (1) In Medication Safety and Cost Recovery, the authors offer their solution for eliminating these failures by introducing a health care industry process intended to increase patient safety, decrease adverse events, and recover lost costs associated with medication errors. In their process, which they call the 100-day plan method, safety, which is a universal value, becomes the core measure for outcomes, cost measures, product selection, and process improvement. This method includes multiple mathematical equations for determining how the change process can decrease the steps in a work activity, thereby reducing the costs for that activity while improving quality.

The authors have ample experience with system quality improvement, cost reduction initiatives in medical centers, and patient safety. They base this book on the quality indicators of several successful corporations and quality corporate leaders. In accordance with their background, they geared the book to graduate-level executive health care administrators.

According to the authors, most high-ranking hospital administrators seem to lack an appreciation for the cost recovery that an error-reducing plan or strategy can achieve; therefore, the authors intend to show health care leaders how they can recover costs by implementing a management system that reduces medication errors and adverse events.

The book is well-written, well-organized, and generally readable. To understand the fine details of the 100-day plan method theory, however, readers need to pay close attention, because the method is written in language suitable for upper management. The four-step approach to increasing performance and preventing medication errors is aimed at executives, for example. The book includes multiple score cards, self-assessments, planning guides, graphics of milestones, and web sites that provide insight into this somewhat complex method. The authors furnish numerous examples that allow the reader to visualize easily the safety outcomes and cost-recovery potential when they use the 100-day plan method.

This book is available from Health Administration Press, 1 N Franklin St, Suite 1700, Chicago, IL 60606-3491, http://www.ache.org/hap.cfm.> NOTE

(1.) Institute of Medicine, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000) 4.

ANNE MARIE HERLEHY

RN, MS

CLINICAL NURSE COORDINATOR

RUSH UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

CHICAGO

COPYRIGHT 2004 Association of Operating Room Nurses, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group