Innovations in Primary Care Patient Safety
Our goal is to leverage and build upon primary care transformation activities in order to contribute to safer primary care delivery for all.
Broadly sharing the success of your safety innovations and your solutions to identified vulnerabilities—and learning from what others have done—is a key component of CRICO’s system-wide primary care risk reduction strategy. Many practices have implemented new clinical systems to create and maintain a safe environment and reduce incidents that could lead to patient harm and allegations of medical malpractice. Working in isolation, clinicians may “reinvent the wheel”—unnecessarily duplicating effort.
We want to learn more about what you’ve developed or adopted. Please send us a note with a brief description of your intervention.
Office of CME
Margaret Janes
RN, JD
Senior Program Director Patient Safety and Education
Maggie is the Patient Safety program director who supports your organization. You can contact her directly with any questions or concerns.
Innovations in Primary Care Patient Safety
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Academic Innovations Collaborative CARES
The Academic Innovations Collaborative CARES initiative is a network of 28 Harvard-affiliated teaching primary care practices in Boston and Cambridge that leverages team-based approaches to care to dramatically improve safety and reduce risk. Each practice participates in order to continue improving the quality of care and patient and provider experience. -
Understanding Malpractice-prone Diagnostic Pitfalls
This work around diagnostic pitfalls aims at developing a new paradigm to promote enhanced reliability in specific problematic diagnoses and the overall diagnostic process. The approach centers around developing a new construct called diagnostic pitfalls. The next step will be to populate, and then test, a list of the specific clinical diagnostic process pitfalls that often lead to delayed or missed diagnoses and, in turn, may result in malpractice suits. -
Patient Safety via OpenNotes
OpenNotes, an innovation that invites patients to review their physicians’ visit notes online, may yield important patient safety benefits. Access has grown to 4.8 million patients nationwide over two years with high rates of approval by both patients and providers. OpenNotes aims to enhance safety by linking clinicians and patients between visits, which are times when ambulatory vulnerabilities often compound. -
I-PASS: Improved Handoffs for Safer Care at CRICO Hospitals
The I-PASS program at Boston Children’s Hospital includes a resident handoff bundle to improve communication at change of shift. Implementation of this resident handoff bundle led to a 40 percent reduction in medical errors. Adaptation of this bundle for nurses led to similar reductions in nursing handoff-related care failures. Currently, work is underway to adapt and implement I-PASS for use across multiple disciplines and specialties, initially in five CRICO-insured hospitals.