Surgeon gives guidance on optimizing hospital safety

Technical advancements and standardized practices have reduced patient deaths from preventable medical errors over the years. But errors are still responsible for between three and five percent of hospital deaths.

Amir A. Ghaferi, MD, MS, a surgeon and U-M Medical School professor with a Michigan Ross School of Business appointment, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that the next wave of innovation in patient safety is organization. For hospitals, that means how they organize individuals and their day-to-day work in a way that optimizes highly-reliable performance.

Writing with Johns Hopkins professors Christopher Myers, Kathleen Sutcliffe and Peter Pronovost, Ghaferi shows how this way of organizing leads to better outcomes for patients and doesn’t require new, expensive technology.

The authors also wrote how standardizing practices could be taken too far and how good organizations allow for variations across patients and medical cases while still keeping errors to a minimum. 

Website: https://hbr.org/2016/08/the-next-wave-of-hospital-innovation-to-make-patients-safer?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=harvardbiz