The patient safety movement "still has some growing up to do," according to Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Dr. Pronovost reflected on the 15-year-old movement in a recent blog post for the Armstrong Institute, noting that while progress has been made, there are several areas in which growth is necessary.
He highlighted the following nine key growth areas:
- Developing better metrics to measure and compare patient safety data
- Building better data management systems for quality, comparable to those used by finance
- Enhancing patient safety data transparency
- Building accountability throughout organizations for meeting patient safety goals
- Motivating physicians to change in a way other than pay-for-performance
- Funding research into safe delivery of healthcare
- Re-engineering care delivery systems for clinicians' ease of use
- Moving away from focusing on one type of harm and instead targeting all harms
- Working to make healthcare a high-reliability industry like nuclear power