Melior Consulting Group

Massachusetts leading health care consulting organization
in the areas of patient safety, quality medical care systems, and cost containment

What's Newest!	Patient Safety Results	Preventable Hospitalizations	About Us and Our Clients

NEW!
Getting Your Best Health Care: Real-World Stories for Patient Empowerment

Ken Farbstein's new book is an illuminating guidebook for all patients - and those who serve as their advocates - Getting Your Best Health Care parses the complex system of care in America. Through practical examples and real-life strategies it steers us toward a more collegial, more efficient, more patient-focused – and undeniably safer – relationship with the system and professionals within it. This book teaches us how to partner with our doctors and nurses and how to stay safe while in their care. Patients have relied for too long on the doctors' brilliance and goodness, believing that Doctor knows best. Doctors do know what's the best medical care, and we know what's best for us. It's time for us to step up as partners in our care. Getting Your Best Health Care is written by working patient advocate Ken Farbstein, President of Patient AdvoCare. Read more

Hospital Patient Advocacy

Patient AdvoCare is a new multi-dimensional service to assist patients and patient families with the increasingly complex and painstaking process of hospitalization. PatientAdvocare improves and streamlines important clinical communications at a time when patients and families need it the most.

Read more about the benefits of having an experienced, knowledgeable advocate at the time when your needs matter the most.s2

Patient Safety Blog - Telling our Stories: Protecting your family in the healthcare system, safe from medical errors.ard!

MELIOR wins
$25,000 award!

Melior is delighted to announce that with our help, CareGroup won the First Annual Premier Award for Quality in Medication Safety. Premier, which represents 1,600 hospitals across the United States, generously provided a $25,000 award, a press conference, a gorgeous crystal trophy, a full-page announcement in USA Today, and an opportunity to present the lessons learned at a conference in San Diego.

Case-based Simulations for Patient Safety

Learning shouldn’t be dreary, stale, pious, or arid. Let us bring our award-winning knowledge of patient safety and our fresh, dynamic approach to your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of clinicians yearning to breathe free!

We bring case-based scenarios and walk your clinicians through them. They reflect on what they have seen, heard, and experienced. Then we lead them through successive rounds of practice and structured reflection. This synthetic experience gets them to practice the new skills.

You choose among three scenarios:

Improving Clinical Communication
- This shows how adverse events are created, and how to prevent them.
Improving Disclosure
- This shows disclosure the way it is done now, and the way it should be done.
Identifying and Uprooting the Root Causes
- This shows how a P&T Committee now tries to reach root causes, and the way it should be done.

Ken Farbstein leads the simulation and the debriefing and reflective discussions on your premises, and will work with you at your site in light of your needs. If you need training solely on disclosure, for example, we can run the disclosure scenario three times in a day, each to different groups of clinicians. Or if your doctors, nurses and pharmacists need training in all three areas, we can run each of the three scenarios once that day, for the same group, or a different group, of clinicians.

CMEs and CEUs can be made available for participants.

For more information, contact Ken Farbstein at 781-444-5525,
and/or read his Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety article (pdf).
n$25,000 award!

Services that Improve Patient Safety

Mayday	When a serious error occurs, we'll tell you what to do now, tomorrow, next week and next month. We perform root cause analyses, identify breakdowns, and jump-start improvements. We give you a plan and a method, an ear and a shoulder, so you emerge with safer systems and a fire-hardened team.
Strategizing for System-wide Change	We help executives plan the approaches that will arouse and harness the energy of their nurses, pharmacists, technicians and doctors. We tailor a strategy that fits you, your staff and your hospital.
Coaching Improvement Team Leaders	We mentor team leaders before, during and after team meetings in the use of the Plan-Do-Study-Act method. We facilitate meetings, making both leaders and teams stronger and able to do more.
Moving from Blame to Responsibility	All too often, organizations blame the individuals when in reality it's a failure or flaw in the system. We build responsibility, inquiry and systemic improvement rather than assign blame, punishment and stubbornness. We design a plan and give you a variety of tools to change the counterproductive mind-sets and systems.
Measuring Improvement	We develop measures of system-wide improvements both for you and the needs of your executives and Board. We help local team members devise, gather, interpret and display persuasive data and measurements.
Assessing the Costs of Poor Quality	We identify, locate and quantify the large and hidden costs of error. We help you prioritize areas of increased savings and safety for your medical practice.

Melior Consulting Group • 307 Brookline Street • Needham, MA 02492-3523
voice (781) 444-5525 • fax (781) 444-1396 • e-mail: kenfarbstein@earthlink.net