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Chapter 9 - Tracing and Remedying Root Causes of Adversities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

Ramalingam Shanmugam
Ramalingam Shanmugam
Affiliation:
Texas State University, San Marcos
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Summary

Any adverse event is detrimental to patient welfare and to the reputations of the hospital/clinic, physicians’ or nurses’ licensing agency, and health insurance providers. All healthcare professionals desire to avoid adverse events. The chance for a recurrence of an adverse event could be lessened if health administrators learn from its first occurrence. For this purpose, health administrators perform what is termed root cause analysis (RCA). More often, RCA is done by interdisciplinary professionals and members of the patient community as an interactive team. There are three types of RCA – divergent, serial, or convergent. Which one among the three is medically or intuitively nontrivial? This chapter provides concepts, tools, and remedial plans to address non-repeatability. This knowledge springs from the collection of pertinent data for the selected adversity, an analytic approach to trace the causes, and setting up plans to ensure its nonoccurrence in the future.

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Data-Guided Healthcare Decision Making , pp. 212 - 243
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

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