Can reporting accidents make a difference?
Several experts say the answer is 'yes'
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations might be on to something.
The Oakbrook Terrace, IL-based organization only has to look at other groups that have been collecting information about medical errors to see positive outcomes. When light is shined into a dark corner, someone might begin to clean it up.
At least, that is what has happened in the field of anesthesiology.
About 15 years ago, the death rate from anesthesia was about one per 10,000 anesthesia procedures. Now the death rate is believed to be about one per 200,000 anesthesia procedures, says Ellison C. Pierce, MD, associate professor at the Harvard School of Medicine in Cambridge, MA, and executive director of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation in Boston.
Even more striking is what has happened to the malpractice insurance rates of anesthesiologists: Ten years ago anesthesiologists paid five times the base level on insurance premiums, and now they pay 1.5 times the base level, Pierce says.
"That saves hospitals a minimum of $10,000 a year in insurance costs," he says. "Use that figure to calculate the savings for the entire United States and it's $300 million, so I think that's a significant factor."
Although a lot has happened in the past 15 years to improve anesthesiology and patient safety, it cannot be overlooked that the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation was founded 13 years ago. And the foundation has been giving out grants, totalling $1.5 million so far, to researchers studying anesthesia safety, Pierce says.
"Nobody was looking at anesthesia research and safety 10 years ago. There were zero papers on the topic at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists [in Park Ridge, IL]," Pierce states. "Now, there were over 100 papers at a recent meeting."
The National Patient Safety Foundation of Chicago was founded by the American Medical Association in Chicago and other organizations in 1996 to provide the same impetus toward better patient safety.
"Primarily what we're doing is looking at the system of health care to find the latent problems that exist within the system so we can identify them and fix them," says Lorri Zipperer, information project manager for the private, nonprofit foundation.
Next year the foundation will give out $400,000 in grants for research into patient safety, Zipperer says. These grants could be given to researchers who are interested in home care safety, as well as other types of health care safety.
The foundation's program will include communicating what it learns and creating public awareness about patient safety, Zipperer says. "We want to find a way to help others apply what we learn."
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