WVMI & Quality Insights offers more than 10 years of experience partnering with hospitals and health systems to improve patient safety. From our self-funding the West Virginia Patient Safety Project to our completing an AHRQ grant and co-founding the West Virginia Center for Patient Safety, patient safety has been vital to our mission of improving the health of the people we serve. Highlights include the following:
WVMI branched into patient safety after the Institute of Medicine released its 1999 landmark report, “To Err is Human.” We researched, designed, and funded the West Virginia Patient Safety Project, which used Web-based technology to reduce medical errors in the state’s rural hospitals. Participating hospitals used the Internet to connect to a database, where they voluntarily entered “near misses” and patient safety events, allowing our experts to analyze and identify preventable errors and trends. We then provided reports to participating hospitals, comparing their data to those of similar institutions. We supplemented the reports with on-site assistance and educational opportunities, including presentations by national experts at our yearly patient safety conference.
WVMI and its partners secured a $1.7 million matching grant from the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) in 2004 based on the promise of the West Virginia Patient Safety Project. About half of all hospitals in the state voluntarily provided WVMI with data on medical errors and initiated efforts to improve patient safety. WVMI analyzed approximately 40,000 events that hospitals logged during the course of the grant. WVMI was recognized by AHRQ in 2005 as one of the top four patient safety projects in the nation and was recognized at its Annual Patient Safety and Health Information Technology Conference. We published a pilot study of medication errors in West Virginia hospitals based on the project, which is one of the largest voluntary patient safety reporting initiatives in the country and one of the first to include rural critical access hospitals.
Our quality improvement efforts complement our patient safety projects. As the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware, we have implemented many hospital and nursing home projects that are closely aligned with patient safety. Currently, we are partnering with nursing homes to reduce avoidable pressure ulcers and the use of physical restraints. Our hospital efforts are centered on improving surgical care and reducing the incidence of drug-resistant staph infections. We are also working to improve drug safety and to help nursing homes and hospitals that need to show improvement on specific quality measures. We previously received a national patient safety award for effectively improving inpatient hospital immunization rates under our Medicare QIO work.