To save millions and improve care, patient engagement needed
If healthcare organizations are going to achieve reductions in medical errors, hospital-acquired infections and hospital readmissions, folks are going to have to work together and senior leadership at those organizations must engage patients and their families in the effort. That's the message of a patient safety webinar hosted yesterday by the National Priorities Partnership that included the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid administrator, Don Berwick, as a speaker.
Last spring, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the Partnership for Patients, a program that could produce ten-year savings of $50 billion in costs associated with preventable medical errors and potentially save as many as 60,000 lives between now and 2013. The program challenges hospitals to cut hospital-acquired infections in Medicare patients by 40 percent and readmissions by 20 percent by 2013.
[See also: HHS announces nationwide effort to reduce medical errors; AHRQ awards $34M in 2011 to fight healthcare-associated infections.]
"The goals are ambitious, they're important, they're exciting and they're possible," said Berwick.
Thousands have pledged themselves to the Partnership for Patients' ambitious goals, Berwick said. "(As) encouraging as all that is, I know, and I hope that everyone listening knows, that this is about results. It's about actually protecting people really day to day, hour to hour, when they're in the hands of the healthcare system. The success of the effort will be the success of actual patient safety. We're taking a great first step and now we have to carry through."
Making the changes necessary to achieve the goals of Partnership for Patients will be hard work said Carolyn Clancy, MD, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. "In some ways, I sometimes think that making care safer and high quality every day, (for) every patient is not unlike trying to lose weight," she told the webinar audience. "What to do sometimes is pretty straightforward. Getting there and actually doing it is pretty painstaking work. We know if we work together, though, we can make a huge, huge difference."
Getting patients and their families involved in healthcare organizations' governance systems is one important way to move toward achieving the partnership's goals, said Tim McDonald, MD, JD, chief safety officer and risk officer for health affairs at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and Robert and Barbara Malizzo, patient advocates and members of the medical center's Medical Staff Review Board.
"Getting the patients' stories, getting the patients in the door at these important meetings and to leadership makes all the difference in the world," said McDonald. "A lot of times we as physicians and leaders get so analytical and so focused on the non-human component that anything that institutions can do to get patients having that dialogue with the CEO, with the board and others, is incredibly valuable."
"When Partnership for Patients started, we early on issued a kind of challenge," said Berwick, "and that challenge is for every single healthcare organization, every single hospital right now in the nation: This is the time to have patients and families in your governance system. It's time to bring them into your board, in committee structures and the board as a whole. I'd like nothing better for every hospital in this country to give us a Christmas present this Christmas, which is to finally take that step and make sure that patients and families are in the governance system. If that is done, the will will rise, the knowledge will rise and I think the speed of accomplishment will increase. I really urge people to take that challenge very, very seriously."
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.
