Lessons from a lifetime thinker and doer At just 7 years old, Story Musgrave faced a crisis that tested his critical thinking. While pretending to drive his father’s red farm tractor, he unlocked the brake, sending himself and the tractor down the hill into the river. He didn’t want to admit he was at fault, […]
patient safety
Armstrong Institute Hosts Inaugural Observership Program
Posted by | Preventing Patient HarmRecently, patient safety collaborators from across the globe traveled to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to take part in the inaugural Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality Observership. Participants arrived ready to take a deep dive with the Armstrong Institute into Johns Hopkins Medicine’s prioritized approach to patient safety. This pioneering three-day observership […]
36 hours. Unlimited possibilities to transform health care.
Posted by | Designing Safer Systems, Organizational and Cultural ChangeImagine this. You are locked in Turner Concourse for 36 hours with relative strangers, tasked with creating a project that will revolutionize health care. Now what? If you are one of this year’s MedHacks participants, you are out of the gate running, ready to innovate and transform health care. MedHacks, run by Johns Hopkins University […]
Radiology’s Quality Improvement Committee: A Formula for Success
Posted by | Designing Safer Systems, Organizational and Cultural Change"That’s how it’s always been done" is a phrase you will not hear uttered in the Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at The Johns Hopkins Hospital or at Johns Hopkins Medical Imaging. Organizations often cite historical precedent for why “option A” is being implemented instead of trying “option B.” The radiology department has seen […]
It’s Not All About the Checklist: The Power of Believing and Belonging
Posted by | Organizational and Cultural Change, Preventing Patient HarmTrine Engebretsen was clinging to life. It was the early 1980s, and the girl had a genetic liver disorder that would kill her if she did not get a transplant. Yet, as she waited for a matching liver, some providers called her parents and urged them not to allow the surgery. They cautioned them that […]
Patient Care: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Posted by | Organizational and Cultural Change, Patient-Centered CareTalking to health care professionals about the importance of loving your patients and colleagues — as I often do — might raise eyebrows. How can we be expected to love our patients during a 15-minute clinic visit? How can love form among hospital teams coming together for a surgical procedure but then moving on to other work? […]
Small Wins Line the Path toward Zero Harm
Posted by | Organizational and Cultural Change, Preventing Patient HarmThe safety concerns that keep clinicians awake at night often aren't issues that you could fit onto a safety and quality dashboard. They aren't the kinds of things that feed metrics on the CMS Hospital Compare website or any of the other sources of publicly reported quality measures. They are intensely local, and no less […]
Rethinking how we think about preventing harm
Posted by | Designing Safer Systems, Measurement of Safety and Quality, Preventing Patient HarmLast week the Armstrong Institute, along with our partners at the World Health Organization, had the privilege of hosting more than 200 clinicians, patient advocates, health care leaders and policy makers for our inaugural Forum on Emerging Topics in Patient Safety in Baltimore. The event featured presentations by international experts in a dozen different industries, […]
A powerful idea from the nuclear industry
Posted by | Designing Safer Systems, Measurement of Safety and Quality, Preventing Patient HarmWhere health care has fallen short in significantly improving quality, our peers in other high-risk industries have thrived. Perhaps we can adapt and learn from their lessons. For example, health care can learn much from the nuclear power industry, which has markedly improved its safety track record over the last two decades since peer-review programs were […]
A roadmap for patient safety and quality improvement
Posted by | Preventing Patient HarmThis month the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) published a new report that identifies the most promising practices for improving patient safety in U.S. hospitals. An update to the 2001 publication Making Health Care Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices, the new report reflects just how much the science of safety […]
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