With Patient Safety Week occurring this month, we wanted to look at how the patient safety space is evolving. More specifically, what types of innovations are changing how we work and how receive care. So this month, we’ve looked at five innovations that are changing patient safety.
Design
To Err is Human - So Let’s Design for it Together
An insightful article on the the importance of design and ‘co-creation’ when it comes to patient safety. With the abundance of data and technology in the healthcare space, how can we innvolve patients, providers and decision-makers to create optimal environments and policies to get the full-picture and create more effective, lasting change?
Bonus article: The New York Times recently ran a great article on how “bad hospital design is making us sicker.”
Sharing Stories
The Stories Clinicians Tell: Achieving High Reliability and Improving Patient Safety
Humans have been sharing stories since the beginning of time. It’s arguably the most important way we learn, empathize and create tools that will succeed in real life. Through the sharing of real events, we can identify key barriers to patient safety and subsequently, build pragmatic solutions.
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality in Medicine - Improving Patient Safety
VR is being used to create simulated experiences in order to improve education, anticipation and empathy of healthcare students and providers. While nothing can replace the complexities and intensities of a real-world experience, a virtual run-through can help better prepare providers for both the expected and unexpected.
Checklists
‘The Checklist Manifesto’ - Excerpt
A checklist isn’t necessarily a technological, revelatory innovation by itself. But when it’s applied without compromise in a high-risk space like healthcare, it can be. Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto, makes a strong argument for checklists and teamwork as a game-changer for patient and provider safety.
High Reliability
High Reliability Organizing
High Reliability Organizations (HROs) have complex, high-risk environments that operative with little to no disastrous events such as airlines and nuclear power plants. They have stringent operational requirements and cultures that put safety above anything else. Many hospitals are adopting the principles of HROs to ensure patient safety despite the chaos, stress and ever-changing nature of healthcare.
