How to Find the Value Sweet Spot With Your Patient Safety Organization(s) (22H)

The quality and safety of care is an inherent core value within healthcare organizations. However, despite a wealth of evidence-based practices and interventions, measurable patient safety improvement across the industry continues to lag. Additional emphasis on improving patient safety is evident in recent federal momentum to drive accountability across the industry. One vehicle to support safety transformation is patient safety organizations (PSOs), which have recently been recognized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as part of the proposed fiscal year 2025 Inpatient Prospective Payment System rule's attestation to the new patient safety structural measure. Market drivers signify that PSOs will continue to be a vital resource to support the culture of safety. Leaders can position their organizations to maximize PSOs as national standards for increased accountability, transparency and incentives spread. More than half of U.S. hospitals are known to participate in a PSO, and your organization is likely reporting to one or more PSOs. Each PSO operates privately and independently, under a unique business model, in service to a specific customer base who influences its design, deliverables and value. Also, many medical providers participate in specialty specific PSOs. For example, one PSO has produced over 100 opportunities to reduce the risk of patient harm by analyzing a case of harm per month, identifying the prevention strategies and reaching over 50,000 specialists in its distribution.

Active engagement in PSOs provides an opportunity to prevent a costly error occurring in one organization from being repeated in other organizations. The session will briefly describe PSOs and their cost/benefit and will focus on specific leader actions to improve an organization's participation in a PSO to maximize value. A PSO learning method, called a Safe Table, will engage the audience in discovering what leaders can expect from PSOs. This session is designed to inform senior executives of how PSO engagement can be integrated into the organization's learning system to drive patient safety and reduce the risk of patient harm. Speakers have over 10 years of experience with hospital and provider participation in PSOs and in governing, leading and starting up PSOs nationally.