Chartered Quality Institute recently celebrated World Quality Week, which focuses on the quality management profession, concentrating on quality’s role in better sustainability as well as its environmental, social, and governance impact. In a healthcare landscape that is growing ever more complex, quality’s impact on sustainability and how the industry reacts and responds to changing regulations is more important than ever.

Engaging with patients early in the study design process allows sponsors to better understand what would make a trial work best for patients, their caregivers, and their families. To get to that point, patient groups can help sponsors to identify barriers up front such as travel distance, length of study visits, and financial costs to patients to determine what aspects of the trial could be better designed to reduce patient burden.

Each year in the United States alone, an estimated 4.8 million hospital patients suffer serious harm through preventable causes. This alarming statistic is the driving factor behind Press Ganey’s Safety 2025 Initiative, which challenges the healthcare industry to achieve an 80% reduction in patient harm by 2025. Accomplishing this feat will take a systemic rethinking of the approach to addressing medical malpractice.

With more than 20 million cancer patients in the U.S., many patients are interested in volunteering their data and experiences to aid in the creation of treatments, but there isn’t a formal mechanism for that right now. So 4medica has created a patient health record app with a user interface that enables the patient to assign their data, or even individual reports and documents, to a doctor or institution.