Grant Funding Available from AHRQ for Patient Safety Learning Laboratories

 

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) invites applications for funding to support the creation of “patient safety learning laboratories,” described by AHRQ as “places and professional networks where interrelated threats to patient safety can be identified, where multidisciplinary teams generate new ways of thinking with respect to the threats, and where environments are established conducive to brainstorming and rapid prototyping techniques that stimulate further thinking.” With this funding opportunity AGRQ recognizes the limited scope of most current patient safety initiatives and intends to “provide an opportunity to be more proactive, to envision the quality and safety of care that patients and providers would like to have, and to test innovative designs that have the potential to alter the status quo and shape a safer future rather than simply add a new patient safety practice on top the existing system.”

Letters of intent are due Jan. 7, and final applications are due one month later, on Feb. 7, 2014.

 

The following is from AHRQ’s description of the purpose of the funding. More information and links to application materials are available at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HS-14-005.html#_Section_II._Award_1.

 

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) funds research leading to patient safety improvements in all settings and systems of care delivery.  While many researchers have endorsed a systems model as a way of thinking about entrenched patient safety problems, there has been a scarcity of programmatic activity that actually engages in new design and systems engineering effort, and that is focused on more than singular patient safety concerns.

 

This P30 FOA [funding opportunity announcement] calls for the creation and utilization of Patient Safety Learning Laboratories.  These learning laboratories are places and professional networks where interrelated threats to patient safety can be identified, where multidisciplinary teams generate new ways of thinking with respect to the threats, and where environments are established conducive to brainstorming and rapid prototyping techniques that stimulate further thinking.  Learning laboratories further enable multiple develop-test-revise iterations of promising design features and subsystems of the sort that can be found in larger-scale engineering projects.  Once the separate projects or systems are developed, integrated, and implemented as an overall working system, the ultimate function of the learning laboratory is to evaluate the system in a realistic simulated or clinical setting with its full complement of facility design, equipment, people (patients, family members, and providers), new procedures and workflow, and organizational contextual features, as appropriate.

 

Under this FOA, applicants will select two to four interrelated patient safety areas as projects for which new and innovative design approaches are needed.  While applicants will select the areas of patient safety focus they consider of high significance, a flexible methodology – problem analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation – is provided that parallels the system development process to give an underlying structure to the four-year level of effort.