The opportunity to improve patient safety is significant and the pressure to improve
it is increasing. An approach to evaluate an organization's progress with patient
safety efforts has not been clearly articulated, and existing efforts to monitor safety
are likely inadequate. We present a framework to monitor patient safety, combining
valid rate-based measures to evaluate outcomes and processes of care, and non–rate-based
measures to evaluate structure and context of care. We present an example of how the
safety scorecard from this framework is used to monitor patient safety at The Johns
Hopkins Hospital and in over 150 ICUs in Michigan, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
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Article info
Footnotes
This work is supported in part by Grant No. K23HL70058-01 from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; and by Grant No. 1UC1HS14246 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
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Copyright
© 2007 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
