Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2018: Two Million Chances to Improve
The ECRI Institute creates a list of the top 10 patient safety concerns each year so organizations can proactively reduce risk and improve the safety of patients. Since 2009, they have collected over two million safety incident reports. Think about that, 2,000,000 incidents. That’s two million chances to improve patient safety by fixing the errors, mistakes or equipment failures that led directly to patient harm.
TapRooT® is incredibly effective helping our partners in the oil, gas, utility, mining and manufacturing industries. We now have the opportunity to bring our expertise to healthcare to help organizations fix these top 10 concerns or any other safety or quality concerns your organization faces.
I’ll use the number one safety concern in 2018, diagnostic errors, to give an overview on how TapRooT® can help you protect your patients.
The TapRooT® process starts with a thorough investigation of the diagnostic error by utilizing our 12-step interviewing technique for all witnesses and subject matter experts, researching the appropriate policy and procedures, reviewing the medical record and any other documentation available like patient surveys. The investigation stage is the cornerstone of the TapRooT® process. It is extremely important to create a timeline of events and list the circumstances around each diagnostic error. TapRooT® organizes all this information in a SnapChart® which provides clarity to the events and conditions around the diagnostic error. The SnapChart® helps your investigators identify the mistakes, errors and/or equipment failures that led directly to the diagnostic error or failed to mitigate the consequences of that diagnostic error.
The next step is to analyze each mistake, error or equipment failure through a root cause analysis using TapRooT’s® proprietary root cause analysis process. You don’t have to be an expert at Human Factors, Communications, Management Systems, Training, Procedures, Quality Control or Work Direction to identify root causes in any of these categories. TapRooT® has that expertise built into the process. Investigators get expert guidance from TapRooT® so the correct root causes are always identified. That built in expertise truly makes TapRooT® unique and leads to consistent results regardless of the expertise of the investigators.
The final step is to create corrective actions that fix the root causes. TapRooT® gives ideas, references and standards to help people build effective fixes that can be verified and validated. TapRooT® will also help build reports for management and help trend data so you can identify generic issues and put fixes in place that will proactively prevent more diagnostic errors from happening.
Once you have a chance to review the top 10 Patient Safety Concerns and want to discover if TapRooT® can potentially partner with you to help improve patient safety in your organization, I’d be happy to set up a call. You can reach me at marcus.miller@taproot.com.
You can get to the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns here:
https://www.ecri.org/EmailResources/PSRQ/Top10/2018_PSTop10_ExecutiveBrief.pdf
