Faced with a growing population of older adults and rising demand for healthcare services, industry leaders’ approach to patient safety must evolve.
Jason Golbin, DO, executive vice president and chief medical officer of Long Island, N.Y.-based Catholic Health, joined Becker’s to discuss the biggest challenges facing patient safety today and how CMOs can successfully tackle them.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are the biggest challenges in patient safety today?
Jason Golbin: The biggest challenge is to prevent avoidable harm. No patient who enters a hospital or care setting should have their condition in any way worsened through an act of commission or omission. When such events occur, we call them “Serious Safety Events,” or “SSEs.” Healthcare systems need to track, analyze, and learn from them, and then put in corrective safeguards to ensure they do not happen again.
Q: What is one effective patient safety initiative you have implemented in your organization, and what made it successful?
JG: Catholic Health started systemically addressing SSEs in a more concentrated way 10 years ago, when we formally launched our HRO journey. We made initial progress, but coming out of COVID, we regressed somewhat — as did most other healthcare systems. In response, our CEO challenged us to reexamine our standing processes and do things differently. In response, we instituted a daily Clinical Excellence Huddle between the hospital [CMOs] and chief nursing officers; a replica at the senior system level of the hospital-based daily Patient Safety Huddle. The goal is the same: to raise real-time situational awareness of what was occurring and to develop and execute on systemic changes to close those “Swiss cheese holes.”
Initially, just reporting SSEs had the positive effect of reducing them as situational awareness increased, as did actionable data. However, as the Clinical Excellence Huddle evolved, we needed to “skate where the puck was going” and looked to get upstream of events. For example, in tracking the number of urinary catheters and the number of central lines, we determined that we could reduce the frequency of use and thereby reduce subsequent SSEs. Put plainly, you can’t get a CAUTI if you don’t have a Foley catheter. In our experience, leadership attention to this level of data has been a game-changer. We are literally driving events of harm down to zero.
