AHA Patient Safety Initiative
What is the Patient Safety Initiative?
The Patient Safety Initiative is a collaborative, data-driven effort that gives hospitals and health systems a strong voice in the national conversation around health care safety, centering the views of clinicians, and telling the hospital and health system patient safety story.
Member Sign-up
Register your hospital or health system for one or more of the AHA Patient Safety Initiative Collaboratives.
Patient Safety Series:
It’s Time to Reenergize our Focus
Joanne Conroy, M.D., CEO and President of Dartmouth Health and AHA Board Chair highlights the commitment to constantly improving patient care. The AHA patient safety initiative helps the field consider how improvements in care can be applied across the country.
It’s Time to Reenergize our Focus
We Want to Learn From Each Other
All of us Working Together Sendsa Strong Message
We Come to Work to Provide the Absolute Best Care
Quality and Safety are Core to our Mission
With Health Care It's Always Been Quality and It's Always Been Safety
What is the Patient Safety Initiative?
The Patient Safety Initiative is a collaborative, data-driven effort that gives hospitals and health systems a strong voice in the national conversation around health care safety, centering the views of clinicians, and telling the hospital and health system patient safety story.
Goals of the Patient Safety Initiative
Increase:
- Engagement in patient safety
- Public trust in hospitals and health systems
- Accurate, meaningful data
- Development of improvement tools and strategies
- Uptake of evidence-based and equity-grounded patient safety measures
- Development of insights to feed advocacy
Decrease:
- Preventable harms
- Inequity and health disparities
- Administrative reporting burden
- Misinformation and disinformation surrounding patient safety
- Collection of data that is unnecessary or compromises patient privacy
Summary
All hospitals and health systems strive to deliver safe, high-quality care to every patient they serve. Our field has led the way in making bold changes to drive improvement in outcomes for decades, and we know that the dramatic improvements we have seen since the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine report are a direct result of that leadership.
We also know that in recent years the unprecedented strain of battling COVID-19 and its aftershocks made it significantly more challenging for hospitals and health systems as they worked to advance safety and quality. Yet, we know the best way to make care safer and better is not more regulation; rather, it is our field’s ongoing collaboration and innovation to drive safety forward. As a result, hospital and health system leaders have shared with AHA their passion to work together to reinforce and accelerate our field’s patient safety efforts.
The AHA is launching a national initiative to boldly reaffirm hospital and health system leadership and commitment to patient safety.
The three foundational issues we will focus on in 2024 include:
- fostering a culture of safety from the board room to the bedside;
- identifying and addressing inequities in safety; and
- enhancing workforce safety.
Focusing on the areas determined by a clinical advisory panel composed of patient safety leaders and clinicians from within our membership and guidance from its strategic advisory group, the Patient Safety Initiative aims to decrease patient harms, increase health equity and improve public trust. This will be accomplished by shifting the national conversation around patient safety and enhancing collaboration among hospitals health systems and their key strategic partners.
AHA is a natural convener for this initiative because of the size and breadth of its membership, its track record of organizing and executing national-scale safety improvement efforts, and members’ expressed interest in collaboration to develop innovative opportunities for advancing patient safety. Hospitals and health system signups are expected to start in November 2023. Safety sprints, engagement cohorts and other opportunities will begin in early 2024. Hospitals and health systems will select their own focus topics from the list recommended by the clinical advisory panel. Through research, engagement, learning collaboratives, data sharing, public storytelling and more, AHA will convene stakeholders and support members as they continuously transform the landscape of patient safety.