Employers Can Take an Active Role in Patient Safety

The Patient Safety Movement, an organization comprising leaders from the patient, provider, and medical technology communities, has an ambitious goal of zero preventable deaths by the year 2020. To this end, the group has issued a list of patient safety solutions, which were developed in collaboration with clinician stakeholders and the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare.

The latest results of the Leapfrog Group’s annual survey on patient safety – coupled with the release of the Emergency Care Research Institute’s top 10 patient safety concerns – make even more relevant the PSM’s directions. Although each group has a slightly different agenda, they both agree that the success of their programs can be enhanced if all stakeholders, including employers, are involved.

Employer action on the patient safety issue could include crafting health benefit plans that reward safety and penalize non-compliance, urging hospital boards to make safety a priority (such as encouraging them to participate in data gathering and implementing safety measures), linking philanthropy to performance and distributing patient safety literature.

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