Institute for Healthcare Improvement and Catholic Health Partners Announce Partnership to Reduce Preventable Harm
Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 2, 2010—The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and Catholic Health Partners (CHP) announced a new partnership to reduce preventable harm throughout CHP’s nine regional health systems. IHI will work closely with CHP – the largest health system in Ohio and which includes 34 hospitals serving people in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania – on a large-scale patient safety initiative that will assist CHP in developing exemplar hospitals that will help spread best practice improvements across the CHP organization.
IHI and CHP recently began the initial phase of this partnership, which is intended to realize the Institute of Medicine’s six Aims for Improvement – health care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient and equitable.
“This partnership with Catholic Health Partners provides an extraordinary opportunity to take evidence-based improvements to scale in the states served by Catholic Health Partners,” said IHI President and Chief Executive Officer Maureen Bisognano. “We look forward to implementing this initiative and drawing on IHI’s wealth of experience in spreading proven improvement practices across the United States and around the world.”
“Over the past 10 years, CHP has striven relentlessly to improve clinical quality and enhance patient safety. Our objective is to harm no patient. Nothing exemplifies our mission better or is as foundational to our strategic direction and annual plans,” said CHP President & CEO Michael D. Connelly. “Now, in partnership with IHI, our intention is to continue to reduce inpatient mortality, eliminate preventable harm, achieve nationally-designated quality measures and increase patient satisfaction.”
Designed by IHI, the initiative with CHP aims to accelerate CHP’s deployment of a cadre of professionals equipped with enhanced improvement and safety knowledge; implement a set of tested and proven changes to improve patient safety within selected hospitals, with the intent of creating a set of exemplar hospitals to spread improvement across the CHP system; and collaborate with leaders at all levels of CHP.
IHI modeled this approach after its Safer Patients Initiative (SPI) in the UK. Building on their experience with SPI, IHI has expanded this work to other systems and countries, such as the Scottish Patient Safety Programme, the Danish Society for Patient Safety and programs with the National Health Service in England.
About CHP
Catholic Health Partners is the largest health system in Ohio and one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S. With $5.05 billion in assets, CHP employs nearly 38,400 associates in more than 100 organizations, including 34 hospitals which serve the health needs of people in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and contiguous states. True to its mission, in 2009 CHP provided $348.2 million, or 8.7 percent of total expenses, in targeted community benefit. CHP earned national ranking as a Top 10 Health System for quality and efficiency in both 2009 and 2010 by Thomson Reuters, which studied more than 250 health systems across the country. CHP is proud that its diverse associates provide high quality care.
About IHI
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (www.IHI.org) is an independent not-for-profit organization that works with health care providers and leaders throughout the world to achieve safe and effective health care. IHI focuses on motivating and building the will for change, identifying and testing new models of care in partnership with both patients and health care professionals, and ensuring the broadest possible adoption of best practices and effective innovations. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, IHI mobilizes teams, organizations, and increasingly nations, through its staff of more than 100 people and partnerships with hundreds of faculty around the world.