The column was authored by Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, the senior vice president for patient safety and quality and the director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.
According to Dr. Pronovost, improving quality and safety demands healthcare organizations to implement top-to-bottom accountability for performance.
“What would it look like if safety and quality truly were addressed this way? It might be something like how most hospitals’ finances are managed, from the board level to the smallest unit,” wrote Dr. Pronovost.
The same discipline, rigor and infrastructure that support the finances of a hospital need to be applied to quality and safety. For instance, organizations need to select meaningful metrics to measure and designate people or groups to hold accountable for performance, such as patient safety specialists.
Additionally, board trustees should be able to review consolidated safety and quality statements, similar to quarterly financial statements, to give them an understanding of the progress being made and the areas that need more focus, according to Dr. Pronovost.
He concedes that boiling down complex information on a wide array of safety and quality measures presents a challenge that doesn’t exist to the same extent with financial numbers.
That said, Dr. Pronovost concluded, “If [trustees] have as much access to patient safety information as they do to financial data, they will be more likely to make preventing harm a priority in action, not just words.”
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