Improving Patient Safety and Quality: What Healthcare Can Learn from the Airline and Nuclear Industries

医疗保健行业的领导者经常关注其他复杂的、自适应的系统，如航空和核工业，以更好地理解他们的挑战和改进的机会。特别是，航空和核工业需要安全监控认证才能运营。These keen observation practices can guide healthcare as it strives toimprove patient safety.

For example, theFederal Aviation Administrationincludes itsSafety Management Systemcertification, and theU.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissionoversees licenses, certifies, and oversees safety compliance in its industry. Meanwhile, in October 2021, a draft of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)Strategic Plan FY 2022–2026, fails to mention patient safety as part of its mission to improve the quality of care—even thoughmedication-associated errorsaffect over 7 million patients and cost more than $40 billion each year.

Clearly, healthcare has progress to make in standardizing safety into its regular operations, as the aviation and nuclear industries do. A straightforward framework for integrating patient safety into healthcare involves culture, clinicalanalytics, and frontline adoption of best practices.

Improving Patient Safety and Quality Through Culture, Clinical Analytics, and Adoption of Evidence-Based Practices

So, what does it take for patients and providers to thrive, like other adaptive industries, in a complex system? The answers center on three areas impacting patient safety and quality:

#1: Culture Must Encourage Speaking Up

If a healthcare organization doesn’t have a culture that values teamwork, accountability, and an environment that encourages speaking up, it’s more likely to experience quality issues. For example, in astudyof 1,341 healthcare professionals, more than half cited cultural factors—specifically, fear of no change or retaliation and fear of negative feedback or being wrong—as barriers to speaking up about patient safety and quality concerns.

With an organizational culture in which frontline staff are comfortable reporting any safety or quality concerns, health systems can more accurately track and responds to safety issues (an essential step in reducing risk). To ensure that staff are comfortable speaking up, leadership must uphold an environment of non-negotiable mutual respect for all team members.

#2: Clinical Analytics Supports Scalable, Sustainable Quality Improvement

Clinical analytics plays an important role in scalable, sustainable quality improvement. Factors driving the importance of clinical analytics include growing regulatory and performance requirements, the demand for more timely data for decision making, and the need to integratedatasources (financial, patient satisfaction, operational, etc.). Data is a vital component of patient safety and quality. But without a supportive culture, data isn’t as effective.

Analytics-driven patient safety applications can help health systems decrease rates of preventable harm by identifying and measuring adverse events and guiding interventions aimed at improvement. Organizations can leverage analytics tools to better understand patient harm at their facilities and prevent it from occurring in critical areas, including the following:

1. Wrong-patient order errors.
2. Blood management.
3. Clostridioides difficile (C. diff).
4. Opioid dependence.
5. Event reporting.
6. Sepsis.

#3: Use Evidence-Based Practices to Guide Quality Standards

With today’s analytic platforms (e.g., the Health CatalystData Operating System (DOS™)) and evidence-based content (e.g.,real-world data和证据)，卫生系统有信息和见解来实施标准、有效的护理实践。While there are unique cases and exceptions in patient care, the industry should leverageclinical analytics允许医疗服务提供者将时间花在高风险病例上，同时确保在所有病例中提供高质量的标准护理。

确立和批准的循证做法是确保患者安全和护理质量的关键组成部分，但只有在卫生系统临床医生和工作人员采用这些做法时才有效。采用包括教育和培训一线临床医生和卫生保健工作者，让患者参与进来，并与临床医生领导合作，以推动最佳实践的采用。以证据为基础的实践需要扎根于一线实践中，从而提高患者的安全和质量。

A Straightforward Approach to the Complex World of Patient Safety and Quality

虽然医疗保健不能总是遵循其他适应性行业的流程来应对不同的情况和挑战，但卫生系统可以通过关注文化、临床分析和一线最佳实践的采用来帮助他们的患者和提供者茁壮成长。通过加强这三个方面，组织可以维持患者的安全和质量，尽管提供者发生了变化，沟通失误，以及其他不可避免的中断和变化。

Additional Reading

Would you like to learn more about this topic? Here are some articles we suggest:

• Improving Patient Safety: Lessons from a Military Operations Framework
• Healthcare Safety Culture: A Seven-Step Success Framework
• Improving Patient Safety: Machine Learning Targets an Urgent Concern
• Survey Shows the Role of Technology in the Progress of Patient Safety
• Introducing the Health Catalyst Monitor™ Patient Safety Suite: Surveillance Module