"It's hard for me to think of any industry that would tolerate not being paid on a system that's wrong more than it's right."Ĭurrently, hospitals providing this information are rewarded with a pay for reporting incentive of 2% of their Medicare reimbursement. Using administrative data, which has been done in the past, "gets it right about one in four times," Pronovost says. The NHSN data, for example, includes central line patients who had a fever. Rather than using administrative discharge codes to tell whether a patient developed a central line infection, which are sorely inaccurate, CMS and CDC are using a much more specific clinical definition of CLABSI, as reported by each hospital, and collected by the National Healthcare Safety Network. Nancy Foster, the AHA's vice president for quality and safety and Pronovost say they're particularly pleased because of the type of data that is now posted. It is funded with an $18 million contract from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to the Health Research & Educational Trust, a non-profit research affiliate of the American Hospital Association. The effort continues to reduce infection rates by 50% as soon as possible. So for the public to see hospitals with rates as high as 3 (and 4), that would really say that, well, it would raise a concern about the commitment to safety at that hospital."Ībout one third of hospitals have enough cases so far to justify a rate, but in late April, another three months of data will be posted, and in July, another three months until all hospitals have enough cases to compare.įor those hospitals that do have enough data, those with over 1.0 SIR are worse than national average, and some are much worse, including 37 with scores above 2.0. With the exception of perhaps some burn units, which treat patients particularly vulnerable to infections, "we've seen rates come down in virtually every type of ICU. ![]() "It simply says there's not enough leadership attention being paid to this." "We've also seen a number of hospitals that started out high, but didn't come down, and the public ought to be aware of that," Pronovost warned. "Now, whole states have CLABSI rates (averages) less than 1."īut even as some hospitals showed success, others appear stymied. "Even in hospitals that were already hitting the benchmark, with rates of 1.1 or 1.5, many were able to cut them in half or more," Pronovost told me. Referring to a 750-hospital cooperative effort funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Pronovost talked about how hospitals proved that if they try, they can improve. It is, he said, "a bellweather for where the country needs to go in paying for outcomes" instead of process measures. "CLABSI is one of the most accurately measured outcome indicators-a canary in the coal mine for quality-because we see that when hospitals focus their efforts, they can make dramatic reductions in these infections." "It sure seemed like there needed to be something stronger that would say to a hospital, 'You know, you're a little above the average, or you're 10 times the national average. No economic incentive to improve," Pronovost said. "Other than media pressure (when a newspaper tackled CLABSI with a front page stories) there has been no other sanction. By allowing the public to view the worst and best and everyone in between, hospitals would be all the more stimulated to improve, raising the bar even higher, he told me. When I reached him at home earlier this week, Pronovost didn't hide his joy. ![]() Perhaps because of dramatic implementation of Pronovost's checklist, these numbers are a dramatic reduction from two years ago when the CDC estimated 248,000 CLABSIs a year with between 31,000 to 60,000 deaths and a cost of $2.7 billion.
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![]() And of course, being fully free doesn’t mean that they’re less valuable than the other pricy tools on the market. It doesn’t mean that you can’t support the development team if you’re not familiar with software engineering, because you can choose to make donations if you want to financially help things move forward. They’re also both open source, which means that you’re completely free to contribute at making the code more reliable, maybe more flexible and even create your own distribution. One more aspect to look at is the cost, which is not a decisive factor in this case since GIMP and Krita are both 100% of cost. The selection options will also come in handy for precision, including the Shape selection, Contiguous, Similar Color, Bezier, and Magnetic selection tools. HDR support, transform tools, drawing assistants, OpenGL enhancement and other awesome features. Krita is keeping up with the competition pretty well from the productivity side, since it’s equipped with a layer management that allows you to combine or group layers and designs. We can mention for example the Bezier curves, layer masks, photo enhancement, hardware support, channel manipulation and so on. When it comes to the production process, GIMP has a lot more to offer. There are some basic animation tools that cannot be compared to the ones included in Krita, but you can still create nice and simple animated GIFs. It also has a lot of handy tools to offer, like the Clone tool that allows you to save a lot of time when doing adjustment on certain areas that feel a bit off. Painting in GIMP can definitely not be compared to Krita, but you’ll find it to be very decent as well. It has selection, mirror image, portrait stamp, masks, pencil, airbrush and others. Looking at things from the side of GIMP, it also offers great tools to create images from scratch, although it’s not very extensive. You can even use the beautiful filters and special effects for the final touches. You can expect a great animation process helping you bring your art to life. If you want to remove a specific section of an image, you can use the Smart Patch tool that will remove if for you without too much of a hustle.Īnd of course, one of the best things about Krita is the fact that it comes with a timeline and animation controls. And to push the process even further, the brush stabilizers will offer you a seamless experience, whether it be on a graphic tab or just using a mouse.īesides theses amazing painting capabilities, Krita is also suitable for photo manipulation and creating HDR images. You can even create your own brushes, import and export them for extensive usage and much more freedom. It comes with nine different brush engines that produce various types of art styles, like chalk, sketch, spray, pixel, particle and more. If we narrow down the comparison to just GIMP vs Krita for drawing, Krita will definitely win. It will definitely allow you to create, refine and adjust your work to come up with stunning results.Īnd since Krita is basically dedicated for digital painting, you can expect some awesome painting tools that can simulate the classic mediums in such a vivid way. Krita comes with many powerful tools for rendering, blending, color mixing, transforming, smoothing, layering and much more. Now that you’re sure about having a fluid workflow with both GIMP and Krita, the next thing you wanna check is the tools and features that you’ll be using. Finally, it opens to you new ways of working such as using layers.It is much faster since you do not need to wait for ink to dry.Drawing on a computer or graphic tablet is less messy.Now that you’re aware of the challenges, here are some of the advantages of digital painting: Alternatively, there are free options like Inkscape or GIMP and Krita that we will cover in this article. There are many paid options like Photoshop and Illustrator. Next, you need to choose the best software for you.To get started you need to choose the ideal hardware for you, like a good graphic tablet for example.Digital painting requires many of the same skills and techniques as traditional painting.Therefore, if you want to become a digital artist here are some things to put in mind: ![]() With the ever increasing in technology, artists need to open a new window for them in the digital worlds. Moving from traditional mediums of using watercolor, oil or acrylic to digital painting seems like a necessary thing to do these days. GIMP vs Krita: is it only a matter of being budget-friendly? |
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