Patient Safety Awareness – COLA Laboratory Excellence Award
In conjunction with Patient Safety Awareness Week, Rice Emergency Room announces that we are awarded the COLA Laboratory Excellence Award for 2022-23. The COLA award recognizes a laboratory that has gone above and beyond to ensure patient safety and quality care. We share this award with you in recognition of patient safety and the high standards we adhere to in providing you with excellence in patient care.
Patient Safety Awareness Week is held in March as an event designed to promote healthcare safety education. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hazardous hospital care causes over 2.6 million fatalities in both developed and developing countries. The Institute for Health Care Improvement expects that by promoting essential dialogues locally and internationally, it will lead to enhanced healthcare safety for caregivers, patients, and healthcare systems in general. (PSAW, 2023)
Why the Emphasis on Safety?
Despite significant progress in patient safety over the last two decades, current estimates place medical injury as the leading cause of mortality worldwide. (IHI, 2023) This is an unacceptable statistic that we don’t subscribe to. At Rice Emergency Room, we know the importance of patient safety which is addressed within the framework of COLA Laboratory practices.
COLA as a Company
COLA Inc. is a nonprofit, physician-directed organization promoting quality and excellence in medicine and patient care through voluntary education, achievement, and accreditation programs. In 1993, COLA Inc. was granted deemed status by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to provide laboratory accreditation. (COLA, 2023)
As a leading laboratory accreditor in the United States, COLA Inc. is the only laboratory accreditation provider operating its accreditation program per a quality management system certified to ISO 9001:2015. This ensures a unique, standardized program and staff dedicated to patient satisfaction and laboratory quality.
COLA Inc. is approved by the federal government and sponsored by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and the American Society of Internal Medicine. They help clinical laboratories provide the best patient care by ensuring that our facility meets federal CLIA and state requirements and benefit from our educational services.
COLA Laboratory Excellence Award
This award signifies the Rice Emergency Room laboratory’s commitment to performing quality patient testing and overall laboratory practices. The Laboratory Excellence Award is achieved by those COLA laboratories that are found to comply with all COLA essential and required criteria at the time of their on-site survey. In addition, award recipients must have demonstrated successful proficiency testing for the prior three testing events and have no substantiated complaints against the laboratory.
Award-Winning Rice Emergency Room Laboratory Facility
Rice Emergency Room provides on-site laboratory excellence to our local communities. Besides our dedication to high standards, our lab services are done quickly with most results in less than an hour. This is peace of mind for our discerning patients bringing world-class care to you, right where and when we’re needed.
Works Cited
Admin. “Homepage.” COLA, 17 Feb. 2023, www.cola.org/
“Patient Safety Awareness Week Free 2023 Toolkits.” Patient Safety Awareness Week FREE 2023 Toolkits, 2023, forward.centerforpatientsafety.org/patient-safety-awareness-week-psaw
“Patient Safety Awareness Week: IHI.” Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 2023, www.ihi.org/Engage/Initiatives/Patient-Safety-Awareness-Week/Pages/default.aspx#:~:text=March%2012%E2%80%9318%2C%202023,for%20patients%20and%20the%20workforce
