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May 22, 2018 01:00 AM

IHI forms nationwide patient safety committee

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has convened 23 organizations including the CMS, FDA and Joint Commission to collaborate on a national strategy to reduce patient harm.

The National Steering Committee for Patient Safety, announced Tuesday, will create an action plan that relies on a "total systems approach" to uniformly apply safety principles across the industry.

The committee was created over concern that siloed approaches to patient safety have stymied progress. Right now, organizations largely work individually on initiatives to reduce patient harm and "we've reached the limits of what a project-by-project approach can achieve," said Dr. Tejal Gandhi, co-chair of the committee and chief clinical and safety officer at IHI.

"We really need to look at patient safety as a public health issue," she added. More than 250,000 people die every year in the U.S. from medical errors, according to estimates.

The committee met for the first time Tuesday to lay out its agenda. They will focus on broad concepts like developing patient safety education for clinicians, promoting a culture of safety at organizations and encouraging healthcare leaders to advocate for safety issues. The organizations will form subcommittees for each focus area.

"It's not feasible to continue to approach patient safety without addressing these foundational considerations in a really substantial way. There are a lot of problems to address and we have to be more efficient about how to do that," said Dr. Jeffrey Brady, co-chair of the committee and director of the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one of the organizations that is part of the committee.

The committee will rely on outcome measures to track progress, Brady said.

The committee also will consider physician and nurse burnout as part of its goals, he added. "Minimizing burden is a practical consideration in the patient safety community now, so I think that perspective will be represented in the committee."

The committee plans to present a complete comprehensive action plan by early next year.