More hospitals adopt safety solutions, report quality metrics

Written by Andy Smith, MTM Publisher

In our last newsletter we reported on the grades given to Hospitals by the Leapfrog Group, a non profit watchdog organization that serves as a voice for healthcare purchasers.

This issue we look at the work of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF)

PSMF works on a global basis, having started in the US and now active in 44 countries.Founded by Masimo President Joe Kiani it has taken a very different route to preventing harm by working directly with large hospital groups and large medical associations. Through group consensus they have identified the main causes of harm within healthcare and PSMF has created 18 Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS) and brought together 4600 Hospitals which have pledged to action these solutions to reduce patient harm.

46 ‘partners,’ including health systems, individual hospitals and not for profits have joined to support the work of PSMF in designing the APSS each bringing their expertise, knowledge and commitment to the task of achieving zero avoidable patient deaths by 2020.

83 instrument providers, including Masimo, Medtronic, GE Healthcare and Philips Healthcare have also joined the movement and have signed an open data pledge to support the goal of zero avoidable patient deaths.

Recently PSMF has begun a points system to grade hospitals, awarding 7 points to any hospital that has developed and deployed a Culture of Safety (basic to safety progress in other sectors) and usually one additional point to a number of other attributes. A score of 21 plus offers a 5star rating and two organizations have reached that elevated status to date; UCI Health and Parrish Healthcare.

PSMF, and other industry led initiatives, have stressed the need to ‘take action’ and offer a welcome and focused ‘urgency’ to improve patient safety. Industry ‘taking the initiative’ may well be the way forward.