Innovations by Posted Date

The El Rio Inner City Asthma Intervention Program is a comprehensive bilingual, bicultural program that primarily serves low-income inner-city Latino children with moderate or severe persistent asthma.

Crisis Resource Management (CRM) is a 7-hour course for labor and delivery (L&D) practitioners that employs various strategies of crew resource management, a safety program developed by the aviation industry, to create realistic simulations designed to facilitate improvement of teamwork and communication skills in a real L&D crisis.

A hospital-based outpatient disease management program serves patients with asthma, chronic heart failure, and diabetes and offers smoking cessation services to smokers. Unlike traditional disease management programs, this initiative heavily involves physicians in the initial referral and throughout the process and targets services toward the sickest patients (rather than to all patients with the condition).

A health plan’s individualized, in-home environmental asthma intervention program targets all pediatric members with confirmed allergies to indoor allergens and symptomatic asthma. During multiple in-home visits, trained asthma counselors provide education, perform an environmental assessment, demonstrate intervention equipment, devise a written care plan, and assess and address psychosocial issues.

HealthSpring's Partnership for Quality program offers bonuses to physician practices and funds practice coordinators and disease management services, leading to significantly better outcomes and reduced costs for Medicare Advantage enrollees.

Healthy Steps for Young Children (Healthy Steps) is a national initiative that encourages use of clinician-childhood development expert teams in physician offices to promote the use of timely preventive care, parent education and support, and other interventions to address the physical, emotional, and intellectual development of children from birth to age 3.

Child care centers and elementary schools in the Rochester area have access to a web-based telemedicine system that allows clinicians to provide remote diagnoses and recommendations for sick children.

The Mid America Heart Institute of Saint Luke’s Hospital developed a customized consent process based on a computer-generated consent form for cardiac catheterization and related interventional procedures.

To reduce surgical site infections, Decatur Memorial Hospital used Six-Sigma techniques to review and standardize workflow processes for surgical patients throughout their hospital stay, with a focus on increasing adherence to evidence-based protocols related to antibiotics.

Nurse Knowledge Exchange (NKE) is a four-step process related to nurse shift changes that is designed to enhance patient safety by conveying vital patient information accurately, concisely, and consistently. Handoff of each patient from one nurse to the next occurs at the patient’s bedside and includes patient participation.

Social worker/nurse practitioner teams collaborate with a larger interdisciplinary team and primary care physicians to develop and implement individualized care plans for low-income seniors; the social worker/nurse team also proactively manages and coordinates the patient's care on an ongoing basis through regular telephone and in-person contact with both patients and providers.

The Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN) Prenatal Care Program seeks to ensure continuity of care for expectant mothers who begin prenatal care in one location and move for employment purposes during their pregnancy; bilingual, culturally competent staff link these migrant patients with prenatal services and manage their medical records throughout the pregnancy.

The Pathways^© Model employs community health workers who connect at-risk individuals to evidence-based care through the use of individualized care pathways designed to produce healthy outcomes.

Bi-Lingual International Assistant Services (BIAS) is a nonprofit social service agency providing psychotherapy, counseling, social support, and citizenship assistance services to frail and disabled elderly who speak little or no English in the St. Louis, MO, area.

A randomized clinical trial at San Francisco General Hospital used visual medication schedules and brief teach-back protocols in English, Spanish, and Cantonese to improve anticoagulant control among low-literacy patients in the public hospital’s anticoagulation clinic.

The Salud Mobile Outreach Program travels to convenient, often frequented locations, primarily in rural areas, and provides medical and dental care, referrals, and patient education to Mexican immigrants, many of whom are poor, uninsured, and monolingual with limited education.

Work Healthy brings together an interdisciplinary team of certified nurse practitioners, health educators, and community health workers to provide onsite health education, health promotion, and clinical services to mushroom industry workers.

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta developed and implemented a comprehensive skin care program to reduce pressure ulcers (PUs) in its intensive care units. Major program elements include training nurses on ways to identify, prevent, and treat PUs; using a pediatric version of a common adult skin assessment scale (the Braden scale) to proactively identify patients at high risk for PUs; and providing early preventive therapy to those at risk, including turning them every 2 hours.

The Lutheran Family Health Centers Network, in collaboration with its school-based health program at PS 24 in Brooklyn, NY, has developed a program known as Healthy Body/Healthy Mind (or Cuerpo Sano/Mente Sana in Spanish).

The Billings Clinic, a hospital in Billings, Montana, addressed its rising rate of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections by making infection control a top institutional priority and by creating a comprehensive package that combines adoption and monitoring of strict infection control protocols, active surveillance, training and education, and the solicitation and implementation of employee ideas through an approach known as “positive deviance.” This term refers to the focus on uncommon strategies that lead to positive changes and results.