Press Release
Lumetra Designated Patient Safety Organization
SAN FRANCISCO, February 10, 2009 — Lumetra, an independent nonprofit organization, has been designated a Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the health services research arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As a PSO, Lumetra provides a secure environment to collect, aggregate, and analyze information regarding the quality and safety of care delivered in any healthcare setting. With this certification, Lumetra is poised to further extend its national reach in providing evidence-based solutions to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and integrity of healthcare delivery across all settings.
“Patient safety makes good business sense,” says Dr. Linda Sawyer, Lumetra’s Chief Executive Officer. “Medical errors, adverse drug events, and hospital-acquired infections are among the most prevalent and preventable patient safety hazards, not only costing patient lives and affecting patient wellbeing, but also impacting productivity and costing hospitals and other providers billions of dollars each year. Organizations investing in patient safety decrease costs, improve clinical quality indicators, increase workflow efficiencies, and avoid exposure to malpractice litigation. In addition to saving lives, this formula puts them in a unique strategic business position to contain costs and win market share in an increasingly competitive healthcare industry.”
According to Jenna Fischer, Lumetra’s Director of Patient Safety, organizations working with Lumetra can report their patient safety events, near misses, and quality of care issues. Lumetra will perform “root cause analyses and recommend quality and systems improvements.” She continued, “The work product will be privileged and confidential.”
The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 (PSQIA) created a system for the voluntary reporting of medical errors and “near misses” to promote the development of interventions and solutions that ensure patient safety. It authorized the creation of Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) to reduce the incidence of events that adversely affect patients.
Lumetra has a long track record in patient safety initiatives, having worked collaboratively on the Patient Safety Event Taxonomy (PSET) a set of national standards for patient safety event reporting, as well as with more than 100 California hospitals to oversee quality improvement projects for the state’s Medicare recipients. These programs also included initiatives to reduce adverse drug events, surgical complications, and hospital-acquired infections. In 2008 Lumetra’s team of patient safety experts made a strong case for business safety in their analysis, “The Business Case for Patient Safety,” demonstrating the dramatic cost of patient safety violations and the benefits of investing in error-reduction initiatives, as well as findings on drug-to-drug interactions and potentially inappropriate medications and their impact on senior populations.
Lumetra is a non-profit, independent professional services organization that works with payer, provider, life science, and government clients to measurably improve healthcare quality while reducing costs through the innovative utilization of clinical expertise and analytic rigor combined with social marketing and cultural competency.
