MedPage Today September 17, 2024
— Don’t assume old strategies and new technologies will improve patient safety
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) published To Err is Human 24 years ago with a call for the healthcare community to focus on patient safety. Despite widespread attention to the report, improvements in quality have been mixed. Because today is World Patient Safety Day, it is important to review the past and propose some solutions going forward.
Many of the quality measures included in the CMS value-based purchasing programs, such as hospital acquired infections (HAIs), demonstrated improvement up until the pandemic. The 2018 National Impact Assessment Report evaluated CMS quality measures from 2006-2015 and demonstrated national performance trends were improving for 60% of the measures analyzed, and were...