A group of researchers led by patient-safety expert Peter Provonost is working to establish a public-private healthcare alliance to improve patient safety modeled on the aviation industry’s Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST). The researchers believe that just as CAST has greatly improved aviation safety, a similar alliance among healthcare stakeholders could reduce medication and device errors and wrong-site surgeries. The group is calling its planned healthcare alliance the Public-Private Partnership to Promote Patient Safety, or P5S.
Under a planning grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the group is refining plans for the governance, processes, and finances of P5S, for presentation to stakeholders this summer. Thus far, all of the major stakeholders, including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Food and Drug Administration, the Joint Commission, the ECRI Institute, and more than 15 large health systems, have agreed to participate.
An article by Provonost and coauthors (including AHRQ director Carolyn Clancy) published on the Health Affairs web site proposes that AHRQ should be the driving force in creating P5S. The agency already oversees the Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs) created to receive medical-error reports under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act passed by Congress in 2005.
Read the article.
