Nov 29 - Patient Safety Conference

Todays conference further reviewed data regarding a recent Medicare inspector general report on medical errors and harm events in US hospitals.  Their study identified serious harm events in ~14% of patients, with another 14% suffering some type of temporary harm.  Overall the physician reviewers found ~44% of these events to be preventable.  The most common causes of harm were medication related - with high risk drugs such as anticoagulants, insulin, narcotics, and sedatives accounting for the largest numbers of medication related harm events.  Substandard care and failure to monitor accounted for most of the other significant harm events.  The cost of these harm events was estimated at over $300 million in October 2008 alone for an annual cost of $4.4 billion annually. 

We will focus the next few months of patient safety conferences working improving high risk medication safety - starting with insulin.

There are a variety of patietn safety organizations that we will use in upcoming patient safety conferences.  Some of the best are linked below.  As you can see - a lot of folks are paying attention.

Institute for Health Care Improvement (IHI)
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
National Patient Safety Foundation
Society of Hospital Medicine Quality Initiatives
National Quality Forum
Leapfrog
Premier, Inc.