Patient Safety Initiative Priorities

To help inform this initiative, the AHA formed a Clinical Advisory Panel, which consists of a diverse team of health care executives, bedside clinicians, and patient safety and quality leaders. A separate Strategic Advisory Group is providing input and counsel on the development of the initiative, including efforts develop critical partnerships, engage stakeholders in the process, and minimize any reporting burdens. In addition, the State, Regional and Metropolitan Hospital Associations, AHA Committees and AHA Regional Policy Boards provided feedback and helped shape the initiative.

As important as is the work around individual topics like health care acquired infections, falls or sepsis, our members told us hospitals already have improvement projects underway with any number of partners around such events. For that reason, AHA’s initiative will instead focus on the foundational elements of safety improvement, seeking to energize all the work already underway.

The three foundational issues we will focus on in 2024 include:

• fostering a culture of safety from the board room to the bedside;
• identifying and addressing inequities in safety; and
• enhancing workforce safety.

In additional to a programmatic focus on these three areas, we will also be asking our members to lift up their local innovations in driving improvement to our AHA Innovation Engine. We will use this engine to highlight practices that are most promising to scale nationally and seek to match those efforts with the resources needed to achieve scale.

Lastly, recognizing that many of the patient safety metrics the field currently reports on take years to reach the public, AHA is proud to be working closely with your core data partners, including at a minimum Premier, Press Ganey and Vizient, to explore how to share more real-time insights into the continuous improvement in the patient safety outcomes we are seeing all over the country.

Collaboratives

Success for the Patient Safety Initiative will require partnership. The AHA envisions a wide range of opportunities to participate not only for our member hospitals and health systems, but state/regional/metro hospital associations, regional bodies, public and private partners, and others.

AHA Patient Safety Initiative Collaboratives:\

• Culture of Safety: Effective Board Processes and Frontline Support for Just Culture
• Culture of Safety: Patient-family Advisory Council Involvement
• Health Equity: Stratification of Key Safety Data by Demographic/Social Determinants of Health Factors
• Health Equity: Connection to AHA’s Health Equity Framework
• Health Care Workforce Safety

Sign-up for the Patient Safety Initiative

Register your hospital or health system for the AHA Patient Safety Initiative. Deadline for registering: December 29, 2023.

*Learn more by participating in an upcoming Office Hours Session with the AHA Team.