Quality and Patient Safety Initiatives
The Institute provides leadership for a wide variety of quality and patient safety improvement initiatives and projects that are influential in improving the care of patients at BIDMC and shares these improvements with other institutions around the country.
Harm/Preventable Harm Transparency Site
In March, 2008 BIDMC launched our Preventable Harm Transparency dashboard. Our goal is to eliminate preventable harm by 2010. The BIDMC initiative to eliminate all types of preventable harm is unique and has required that we develop definitions of both “harm” and “preventable”’ as well as new methods for capturing, classifying and recording when harm occurs.
We are now disclosing our progress to the public so that others can learn from our experiences. Learn more about this initiatve.
Improving Adverse Event Reporting
Recognizing BIDMC’s commitment to transparency and leadership in reducing harm to patients, the Patient Care Assessment Division of the Board of Registration in Medicine is working collaboratively with BIDMC to improve BORM’s Adverse Event Reporting processes. This pilot effort initiated in March 2008 seeks to expand the identification of Adverse Events, and improve the efficiency, usefulness and productiveness of event investigation and corrective action planning for physicians and institutions throughout Massachusetts.
SPIRIT: Solutions Promoting Improvement Respect Integrity and Teamwork
In the Spring of 2008, BIDMC launched a Medical Center-wide program to engage in real time problem solving. This program trained over 600 BIDMC’s supervisors, managers, directors, vice presidents, chief residents and physician chiefs in key concepts of real time problem solving: observing daily work routines, solving to root cause, and working cross-departmentally to develop solutions.
In groups of 20, participants learned basics concepts in the morning session. In the afternoon session, small teams of participants applied the techniques learned to real situations as they traveled to a variety of practice areas and observed people working, looking for “work–arounds” or hunting and fetching activities that made work flow inefficient. After observation, the teams engaged in real time problem solving to address issues identified that day.
Proactively engaging in real time problem solving, and eliminating work-arounds and time wasted “hunting and fetching” will result in more time and energy spent on patient care – delivering increased patient safety and greater patient satisfaction.
