TMC organizations collaborate on patient safety initiative
HOUSTON - (March 15, 2010) - Quality and safety leaders from eight health organizations in the Texas Medical Center, including The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), have formed a collaborative group to compare notes on their ongoing efforts to reduce medical errors.
Melinda Perrin
Patient safety advocate
While the majority of health care is delivered without incident, accidents do occur, said Eric Thomas, M.D., a professor at the UTHealth Medical School and director of The University of Texas-Memorial Hermann Center for Healthcare Quality & Safety.
According to a 1999 report by The Institute of Medicine, up to 98,000 people die every year as a result of medical errors in the United States. Most medical errors are related to systems and are not attributable to individual negligence or misconduct, the report states.
“The use of state-of-the-art clinical information and communication technology will be key to helping organizations address these systematic problems,” said Dean Sittig, Ph.D., an associate professor at the UTHealth School of Health Information Sciences. “The School of Health Information Sciences faculty has considerable knowledge and experience working in this area and is poised to lead this exciting endeavor.”
The collaborative group is the brainchild of Melinda Perrin, a UTHealth development board member and an advisory council member at the UTHealth School of Health Information Sciences, and her goal is to make Houston the safest place in the world for health care.
“This is an incentive for us to all work together,” she said. “There are plenty of things for us to compete on, but patient safety is not one of them.”
The collaborative group includes UTHealth, the Harris County Hospital District; Memorial Hermann Healthcare System; the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center; St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System; Texas Children’s Hospital; The Methodist Hospital System; and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Thomas said the quality and safety leaders in the collaborative group are sharing their experiences in regard to the implementation of a surgical safety checklist developed by the World Health Organization.
“Checklists are used in the airline industry and in military settings with success,” Thomas said. “The same holds true in health care.”
A patient safety study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009 showed that hospitals using a surgical safety checklist experienced a 36 percent reduction in postoperative complications and mortality.
Standardizing safety policies could reduce medical errors, he said. These policies can vary from hospital to hospital and many healthcare providers work in multiple facilities.
According to the 2006 National Hospital Discharge Survey, 46 million procedures were performed on hospital inpatients in the United States.
The National Patient Safety Foundation observed Patient Safety Awareness Week March 7 – 13 to raise awareness of patient safety initiatives, improve the quality of health care, and strengthen alliances between patients, families and their healthcare providers.
Meredith Raine
Media Hotline: 713-500-3030
