Grants and Research Projects
As part of its Mission, the Silverman Institute serves as the coordinating center within BIDMC for innovative research targeted toward expanding and enhancing the application of quality improvement tools and techniques in health care. On-going research efforts include:
Creating a "Roadmap" to Transform Medical Liability System
Disclosure, apology and offer, a program where clinicians and hospitals respond to an adverse event with clear facts, an appropriate apology and timely and fair financial compensation if warranted, is a viable but underutilized element in efforts to reduce health care costs in Massachusetts, according to preliminary findings of a federally funded study. “The ultimate goal of “The Roadmap for Transforming Medical Liability and Improving Patient Safety in Massachusetts,” is to create a new system that improves patient and provider trust, reduces fear and improves patient safety,” says Ken Sands, MD, MPH, senior vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is drafting the roadmap in conjunction with the Massachusetts Medical Society, backed by a $273,782 grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
BUILDING THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS OF Physician Leaders in Hospital Settings
Sponsored by the Physicians Foundation and led by experts in health care systems improvement at the Silverman Institute for Health Care Quality and Safety and the BIDMC Organizational Development (OD) team, this project aims to increase the pipeline of physicians prepared to lead change in rapidly-evolving health systems settings. The model focuses on developing the leadership skills of a cadre of competitively-selected physicians and would be easily replicated by other institutions. Key elements include leadership style assessment, didactic and experiential learning modules led by senior hospital executives (CEO, CFO, COO) and others, ongoing coaching, and mentorship by senior physicians. Because the model is based at the Medical Center and not treated as an off-site training program divorced from the clinician’s assumption of a leadership role, it is an innovative way to integrate leadership development within the institution.
“Time-Varying Risks and Outcome Measurement: The Pernicious, Pervasive Patient-Day.”
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this research seeks to identify quality metrics which do not accurate reflect how risk varies as a function of time and across different phases of clinical care (such as falls per 1,000 patient-days) and how use of these metrics can lead to misleading or biased estimates of the effect of interventions. This research seeks to develop and validate a strategy for overcoming these limitations, leading to more reliable CQI measurement techniques for phenomena with time-varying exposure risk. Knowledge gained in this work will thus become part of the scientific literature and available to all.
“Program to Accurately Assess and Reduce Patient Harm”
Funded by the RX Foundation, this large 3-year grant award will advance our “Program to Accurately Assess and Reduce Patient Harm” and enables BIDMC to:
- broaden internal efforts to report all harm, evaluate contributory factors and assess opportunities for prevention;
- collaborate with IHI to conduct an evaluation of our systems for capturing harm;
- enhance our centralized repository for capturing of harm events, analysis and reporting; and
- create a robust mechanism for disseminating information about harm events and structures this information in a way that findings can be publicized to the clinical and academic communities.
“Making Ambulatory Procedural Care Safer: STAMP-Based Risk Assessment and Redesign – Model Validation”
Funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, this grant funds BIDMC’s initiative to design, implement and evaluate a series of interventions aimed at reducing the system pressures that create unsafe operating conditions within the ambulatory procedural domain. This grant supports development of a toolkit for use by other organizations, based upon the ideas tested and implemented at BIDMC.
Last Updated: November 25, 2011
