Patient Safety in West Virginia
Overview The West Virginia Medical Institute’s patient safety project, “Partnering to Improve Patient Safety in Rural West Virginia,” was one of four in the nation featured at a June 2005 conference sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Washington, D.C.WVMI’s project was chosen from among more than 100 recipients who also received a Transforming Healthcare Quality Through Information Technology Grant from the agency known as AHRQ.
WVMI in October 2004 received more than $800,000 in federal funding as part of a $1.7 million matching grant to use technology to improve patient safety in the state. The other grant partners are the West Virginia Hospital Association, the West Virginia State Office of Rural Health, Verizon and Quantros Inc.
Under the grant, the partners provide rural hospitals with software and technology to record medical errors and “near misses” (errors that could have happened but were averted). For their efforts, hospitals receive educational opportunities, reports of system-wide “near misses” and opportunities to share lessons learned and improvements that lead to better, safer health care.
The grant was used to expand the project, which is in its third year of funding. Twenty nine hospitals voluntarily provide WVMI with data on medical errors, and more than 33,000 events have been reported. WVMI’s leaders began laying the groundwork for the project in 2001 after the Institute of Medicine released the landmark report To Err is Human.
For more information, contact Project Director Patricia Ruddick at (304) 346-9864 ext. 4211, or e-mail her at pruddick@wvmi.org.