The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.
PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Health Serv.
Sec. Patient Safety
Volume 4 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/frhs.2024.1488944
This article is part of the Research Topic Responding to Harm with Compassion, Accountability and Transparency View all articles
Measuring how healthcare organizations respond after patients experience harm: perspectives and next steps
Provisionally accepted- 1 1. Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
- 2 2. UW Medicine Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement, Seattle, United States
- 3 n/a, Philadelphia, United States
- 4 4. MedStar Health Institute for Quality and Safety, Columbia, United States
- 5 5. CommonSpirit Health, Chicago, United States
- 6 6. Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, United States
- 7 7. Risk Management Communications, Reno, United States
- 8 8. Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, United States
Patients can experience serious harm from healthcare, the impacts can be prolonged, and events may also affect families and clinicians. Communication and Resolution Programs (CRPs) are designed to reduce these negative impacts, rebuild trust, and improve patient safety, but are not consistently implemented. To inform implementation efforts, enable accountability, and promote innovation, it is critical to develop standardized performance measures assessing CRPs' structure, process, and outcomes. To advance CRP measurement, an interdisciplinary workgroup from the Pathway to Accountability, Compassion, and Transparency (PACT) Leadership and Innovation Network - a group of leading healthcare organizations with CRPs - explores meaningful approaches to measurement and proposes a set of next steps. Interested parties in CRP measurement prioritize developing person-centered outcome and experience measures; assessing equity; addressing clinician and organization concerns about how CRP measurement may affect reputational and legal risk; reducing the burden of measurement; and improving mechanisms for sharing data across organizations to promote transparency, accountability, and broader patient safety improvements. Recommended next steps include: build a national coalition of interested parties to guide the work; overcome barriers to measurement and improve feasibility, especially through the engagement of patient safety and risk management software vendors; explore measure development processes that focus on patient, family, and clinician-centered outcome and experience measures; define nationally recognized standardized CRP measures; consider the role for regulatory and financial incentives to promote their use; and facilitate data sharing and comparative analysis. Ongoing engagement and strategy will be essential to move CRP measurement forward.
Keywords: Patient Safety, quality measurement, Communication, Reconciliation, Benchmarking
Received: 30 Aug 2024; Accepted: 30 Dec 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Sokol-Hessner, Adams, Hemmelgarn, Miller, O'Connor, Parkerton, Schweitzer and Austin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Lauge Sokol-Hessner, 1. Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.