In the industrywide transition to value-based care, reimbursement is increasingly based on performance and modern health care consumers expect higher quality care. There’s an emphasis on high reliability and zero harm for health care organizations. The only way to achieve zero patient harm is to create and champion a culture of patient safety, engage data-driven strategies to eliminate avoidable events and balance safety with other organizational priorities.
On this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we hear from Dr. Seth Krevat, assistant vice president for Safety at MedStar Health and a faculty associate at MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare. Under Dr. Krevat’s guidance, MedStar has gone through massive culture change, implemented the tools and behaviors of a High Reliability Organization, implemented a new event review process to evaluate serious safety events through the lens of safety science and leveraged the value of increasing numbers of incident reports submitted by MedStar’s workforce.
Today, Seth discusses the goal of a high reliability organization and the role of a zero patient harm safety program.
- Let's start broad: Why is high reliability a major concern for health care organizations, and what do we mean when we talk about "zero harm" for patients?
- High-reliability organizations compile the results of their investigations across many harm events and close calls to identify which of their safety systems or defenses are most in need of improvement. What are some of the things that hospitals should examine as they begin the journey toward becoming an HRO?
- What are some of the common barriers to high reliability and zero harm?
- What is the role of HIT in high reliability and zero harm?
- Are there specific tools – perhaps related to predictive analytics or cognitive assistance – that you employ at MedStar?
- What future trends do you see with high reliability and zero harm and patient safety?
- Patient safety is a top priority across health care right now, what are you focused on and what are you expecting to focus on a year from now?
Listen to the full episode below, or click here to view all episodes of The Cerner Podcast!
