American Hospital Association debuts national patient safety initiative

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In an effort to improve patient safety, the American Hospital Association is planning to give hospitals more data and tools through a new national initiative – one that promises to aggregate insights on safety improvement efforts at a national scale.

Through the new Patient Safety Initiative, the AHA plans to give hospitals a platform and resources through which they can track their improvement efforts, as well as highlight successful local innovations and scale them nationally. 

It will also inform public policy discussions about the most effective policy steps to support, spread and sustain safety improvement, the AHA said.

WHAT'S THE IMPACT?

With input from patient safety leaders at hospitals, health systems and other groups, the initiative will center on three foundational elements of patient safety improvement:

• The culture of safety from board to bedside.
• Health equity, which focuses on ensuring all patients receive safe care regardless of their race/ethnicity, gender, preferred language and health-related social needs.
• Workforce safety, which will aim to ensure the healthcare workforce practices in a safe environment that supports their physical and emotional wellbeing.

"This hospital- and health system-driven initiative will help hospitals further their commitment to advancing their work on these three topics," said AHA president and CEO Rick Pollack. 

Beginning early next year, the AHA will begin new collaboratives that will share strategies and resources to support hospitals in addressing these areas, he said.

At the same time, the organization said it's working with data partners to explore how to share more real-time, nationally aggregated insights into the continuous improvement in patient safety outcomes the AHA currently sees around the country.

Details about how to participate can be found on the AHA's website. 

THE LARGER TREND

Artificial intelligence is one focus area for patient safety as AI is increasingly used in the healthcare industry.

Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, chief transformation and innovation officer at Sheba Medical Center, which is located on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, said in January that patient safety efforts have been lagging.

"In terms of patient safety, we've made no progress over the past 30 years," he said.

Zimlichman leads the Accelerate Redesign Collaborate (ARC) Innovation Center at Sheba, which, with close to 2,000 beds, is among the largest health systems in the Middle East. ARC is focused on precision medicine, big data, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, telemedicine and mobile health.

In 2016, ARC launched Aidoc to help physicians read CT scans. It has been implemented in 1,000 hospitals, with 800 of those located in the U.S.
 

Twitter: @JELagasse
Email the writer: Jeff.Lagasse@himssmedia.com