Lumetra Patient Safety Organization
Healthcare leaders nationwide clearly agree that more needs to be done to reduce morbidity, mortality, and the cost of preventable medical errors. Although great strides continue to be made each day, no one disputes there is more to be done. Patient safety remains a great concern and priority for healthcare administrators, providers, and patients alike. Medical errors compromise care, consume resources, and can result in expensive legal action. According to the Institute of Medicine, they cost $17 billion to $29 billion per year. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) reports that one admission in ten on an annualized basis results in a patient safety incident, with a 7.1 day extended length of stay per incident. Patient safety incidents are costly both in lives, well-being, and healthcare dollars.
Until recently, the astronomical cost of patient safety incidents has been passed along from hospitals and other providers to payors. This, however, has recently begun to change. In October 2008, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published a list of 11 ‘Never Events,’ which the agency deemed preventable and therefore not eligible for reimbursement. Other insurers are following Medicare’s lead, which furthers the business case for healthcare providers to implement a comprehensive patient safety program.
There are several reasons why patient safety has lagged behind other progress made in healthcare quality and cost reduction:
- Historically, the healthcare market has been severely fragmented, resulting in poor data collection and analysis of medical error incidents.
- Because the problem is ubiquitous, accountability is poor. The healthcare provider culture is embedded with a ‘blame game’ mentality, resulting in a failure to determine the root cause of patient safety errors.
- There is a lack of uniformity and consistency in the reporting of patient safety incidents; therefore, the opportunity to track, learn, and improve is lost.
The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 authorized the creation of Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) to help reduce the occurrence of events that adversely affect patients. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality administers the provisions of the Patient Safety Act and the Patient Safety Rule dealing with PSO operations.
What is the purpose of a PSO?
The Patient Safety Rule establishes a framework by which hospitals, physicians, and other healthcare providers may voluntarily report information to PSOs, on a privileged and confidential basis, for the aggregation and analysis of patient safety events.
The Patient Safety Rule outlines how PSOs can be a source of confidential and privileged external advice for healthcare providers seeking to understand and minimize the risks and hazards in delivering patient care.
Studies have found that there are validated justifications for investment in patient safety, with correlations between patient safety and liability loss costs as well as between highly ranked Medicare hospitals and a lower incident of patient safety events. AHRQ has embarked on an aggressive national program to assist providers with the journey to improve patient safety and realize considerable economies of scale by working on a nationwide basis.
Integrated solutions
The Lumetra Patient Safety Organization, a division of Lumetra Healthcare Solutions, has been listed with AHRQ since January 2009 and, as a PSO, works with providers nationwide to reduce the incidence of events that adversely affect patients. As a federally designated Component Patient Safety Organization, Lumetra PSO offers participating providers and other PSOs a blended software and services solution to optimize patient safety improvement activities, resolve the complexities associated with risk management at their root cause, and enable healthcare providers to report patient safety information without fear of legal discovery. Lumetra PSO provides the following:
- A secure and confidential environment to report, aggregate, analyze, and manage your patient safety product information
- Through our strategic partnership with ISOFT, we offer affordable access to Web-based AIMS risk management software
- Comprehensive analytics for strategic reporting of de-identified benchmarking data to the national Network of Patient Safety Databases (NPSD)
- Sustainable program development and implementation, including clinical redesign
- Access to the Lumetra PSO Helpdesk
- The added value of our experience in clinical quality improvement and patient safety consulting
- Organization culture change training
- Clinical redesign and program implementation
Lower costs
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.
Patient safety violations compromise patient care, increase economic burden, impair profitability, and weaken organizational performance and staff morale. The 2006 IOM report, “Preventing Medication Errors,” estimated that at least 1.5 million preventable adverse drug events occur in U.S. each year. In the hospital setting alone, preventable medication errors cause more than 77,000 injuries and death annually, at a cost of $5.6 million per hospital.
Lumetra PSO provides a framework for understanding the dimensions, costs, and benefits of patient safety interventions for your staff and your company. Our cost-effective patient safety strategies make good business sense. We help you:
- Link incident reporting with provider education and quality improvement
- Improve systems and redesign processes through organizational design, process improvement, reminder systems, and clinical pathways
- Transform a culture of blame into a culture of safety, where providers can report errors without fear
- Implement patient safety technology plans, including computerized physician order entry, electronic health records, and bar code medication administration