100,000 Lives Campaign exceeds participation goal
Adhering to safety initiatives will save lives
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) announced its 100,000 Lives Campaign one year ago, with the lofty goal of enlisting 1,500 to 2,000 hospitals that would pledge to adopt six initiatives that, if implemented, would save 100,000 lives over an 18-month period by preventing avoidable medical errors.
But within a year, the campaign has signed on 2,800 hospitals, representing more than half of the nation’s hospital beds, according to IHI President Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP.
The 100,000 Lives Campaign focuses on six initiatives that Boston-based IHI says would, if implemented reliably by at least 1,600 hospitals, save 100,000 lives by June 2006.
Participating hospitals pledge to develop rapid-response teams, administer appropriate drugs for heart attack patients, prevent adverse drug events, reduce surgical site and central line infections, and reduce ventilator-related pneumonia.
The American Medical Association, American Nurses Association, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration are among the organizations partnered with the IHI for the campaign.
Results will be made public in June.
Participating hospitals are encouraged to report their mortality data publicly when data are submitted in June, Berwick says.
The initiative was the IHI’s response to a 1999 Institute of Medicine report estimating that as many as 98,000 people die each year due to medical errors due to systemic failures rather than individual mistakes.
The 100,000 Lives Campaign centers on six initiatives that studies have shown can save lives. The initiatives are:
• Use of rapid response teams at the first sign of decline in patients who are progressively failing outside the intensive care setting;
• Ensuring the reliable delivery of evidence-based care for patients hospitalized for acute myocardial infarction;
• Preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia by reliably implementing a set of interventions known as the "ventilator bundle;"
• Preventing surgical site infections (SSIs) by reliably implementing a set of interventions known as the "SSI bundle" in all surgical patients;
• Preventing adverse drug events by implementing medication reconciliation; and
• Preventing central venous catheter-related bloodstream infections by implementing a set of interventions known as the "central line bundle" in all patients requiring a central line.
Berwick says the initiatives are not new, but with strict adherence to what they already know is effective, hospitals can achieve the goal of 100,000 lives saved.
IHI provides the information needed to participate in the campaign on its web site (www.IHI.org), and there is no cost to participate. However, participating organizations must be willing to implement changes and to participate in the reporting process.
Berwick says the campaign is not a retread of what hospitals are already doing — it’s a new way of looking at what the medical community knows works.
He cites statistics that make the consistent use of these methods necessary: the Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as 98,000 people die each year in U.S. hospitals due to medical injuries; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that 2 million patients suffer hospital-acquired infections each year; and studies show that although the United States spends the most money on health care of all industrialized nations, it still performs poorly on many measures of health care quality.
Source
- Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, president, Institute for Healthcare Improvement. 20 University Road, 7th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138. Phone: (617) 301-4800. Web site: http://www.ihi.org/IHI.
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