How to Establish an Effective Patient Safety Committee

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) places emphasis on patient safety by prioritizing systems of care delivery that:

• Prevent errors
• Learn from the errors that do occur
• Are built on a culture of safety that involves healthcare teams, organizations, and patients

With that in mind, patient safety is every healthcare professional’s responsibility and should be an organization’s number one priority.

One crucial aspect of improving patient safety is to establish an effective patient safety committee. The purpose of this committee is to identify opportunities to promote initiatives that improve the quality and safety of patient care and to identify patient safety trends and opportunities to develop sustainable interventions.

The patient safety committee does so by reviewing multiple sources, including:

• Learnings from serious and sentinel event reporting
• Mortality reviews
• Comparative outcomes data
• Patient safety indicators
• Hospital accreditation surveys
• Closed litigation cases
• Moral distress consults
• Patient grievance data
• Culture survey data

The patient safety committee uses learnings from these sources to identify priorities for committee about clinical or operational changes that are needed and monitors those efforts for effectiveness.

However, the majority of the more than 890,000 healthcare facilities in the United States – especially small to mid-sized providers – have not yet implemented technology to monitor, manage, and optimize patient safety and quality. As a result, the data patient safety committees rely on to improve outcomes is often inconsistent or incomplete.

In other words, when healthcare organizations rely upon manual patient safety tracking, they lack the tools for effectively synthesizing event data for the purposes of learning, training, prompt remediation, and prevention.

That’s why healthcare incident reporting software is a critical component of efforts to improve patient safety and quality of care, efficiency, and reduce health disparities across healthcare organizations by allowing them to track and learn from medical errors and other patient safety incidents.

An incident reporting system can solve data collection issues. It facilitates incident data aggregation and analysis so that patient safety committees and other relevant stakeholders can perform root cause analysis, identify patient safety trends, and determine ways to reduce and prevent further harm.

With the right incident reporting software, it's possible for healthcare organizations to improve patient safety and quality of care by decreasing medical errors, reducing patient risk, and improving overall patient safety — more efficiently than ever before

However, the majority of the more than 890,000 healthcare facilities in the United States – especially small to mid-sized providers – have not yet implemented technology to monitor, manage, and optimize patient safety and quality. As a result, the data patient safety committees rely on to improve outcomes is often inconsistent or incomplete.

In other words, when healthcare organizations rely upon manual patient safety tracking, they lack the tools for effectively synthesizing event data for the purposes of learning, training, prompt remediation, and prevention.

That’s why healthcare incident reporting software is a critical component of efforts to improve patient safety and quality of care, efficiency, and reduce health disparities across healthcare organizations by allowing them to track and learn from medical errors and other patient safety incidents.

An incident reporting system can solve data collection issues. It facilitates incident data aggregation and analysis so that patient safety committees and other relevant stakeholders can perform root cause analysis, identify patient safety trends, and determine ways to reduce and prevent further harm.

With the right incident reporting software, it's possible for healthcare organizations to improve patient safety and quality of care by decreasing medical errors, reducing patient risk, and improving overall patient safety — more efficiently than ever before.

Performance Health Partners helps healthcare organizations prioritize patient safety and foster high-quality outcomes. Our patient safety solutions are built to grow and scale with you over time to protect the health and safety of both employees and patients. To learn more, request a demo.