Patient Safety Awareness Week: March 10-16th

Patient Safety Awareness Week is not only about creating awareness of the need to improve our patient safety outcomes but also a time of recognizing the great work already being done by healthcare professionals.

I was honored to spend a couple of days with the Risk Management and Patient Safety team at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia last week.  Their commitment and dedication to improving patient safety was very impressive.  Emory Healthcare has  incorporated TapRooT® as their root cause analysis tool for continued process improvement.  Dr. Cynthia Lightner is leading this charge and I want to personally thank her for inviting me to attend.

My mission is let the healthcare industry know TapRooT® is a continuous improvement process  that will help organizations save more lives.  Dr. John James has a great article in the Journal of Patient Safety:  A New, Evidence-based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care  Dr. James has found that as many as 400,000 people lose their lives every year because of medical errors. That gives us a huge opportunity to save the life of someone’s wife, husband, mom, dad, son or daughter.  What an incredible impact we can have by fixing some of the underlying causes of medical errors in a structured, proven continuous improvement process that has over 30 years of human factor research built into it.

The Institute of Healthcare Improvement cites these disturbing statistics:

• 5 percent of US adults who seek care in outpatient settings experience a diagnostic error.
• The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates that, at any time, 1 in 31 hospitalized patients has an infection acquired in the health setting.
• Medication errors and adverse events are among the most common errors in both inpatient and outpatient settings.
• In a recent survey of a representative sample of Americans, 21 percent said they had experienced a medical error in their own care or in the care of a close relative or friend.  Beyond personally experiencing errors, 31 percent of Americans report that someone else whose care
  they were closely involved with experienced an error.

What’s your plan to bring awareness of patient safety improvement opportunities to your teams and what tool will you provide so they can make a true difference and save lives?  If you want to find out more on how Emory Healthcare or The Military Health System uses TapRooT® to diagnose challenges to find root causes that can be fixed to improve outcomes, contact me at marcus@taproot.com.