New Press Ganey Initiative Aims to Reduce Patient Harm by 2025
By Jay Kumar
Press Ganey this week launched a new initiative, Safety 2025: Accelerate to Zero, which hopes to reduce patient and caregiver harm by 80% over the next five years.
Through the program, Press Ganey will give participating organizations access to its HPI Press Ganey Patient Safety Organization (PSO) platform and learning forums, along with education and best practices around high reliability and zero harm.
“Safety 2025 is a true partnership between Press Ganey and our partner community,” said Carole Stockmeier, Press Ganey strategic consulting partner.
Press Ganey asks participating organizations to commit to a five-point pledge:
- Lead for safety in word and deed, starting with hospital board, CEO, and executive team.
- Declare zero harm as the organization’s goal.
- Make harm visible and be transparent about safety events.
- Put a face on safety and recognize that each event is a person, not a statistic.
- Share your safety event data in the HPI Press Ganey PSO platform for cross-industry learning and participate in the HPI Press Ganey Learning Forums.
Stockmeier said Press Ganey will waive its PSO membership fee for participating organizations and the membership will last until January 1, 2025.
Members receive the following:
- Technology and data services that enable analyses of safety events across the organization and comparison to peers
- Press Ganey’s proprietary Safety Event Classification® and Serious Safety Event Rate® eLearning program to train safety professionals on the common classification system necessary to compare safety event data with those of other organizations
- Participation in Press Ganey’s “all share, all learn” forums, including the Safety Event Classification Advisory Panel, Cause Analysis Grand Rounds, and quarterly Safe Tables focused on reducing the risks impacting patients and caregivers every day
- Foundational education forums offering best practices to improve safety and reduce harm, including Zero Harm Core Commitments and Fundamentals, and a Reliability Learning Series hosted by Craig Clapper and Tejal Gandhi
- Networking opportunities with members of the HPI Press Ganey PSO community to help drive best practices
“We see organizations that commit to high reliability can achieve 80% or more reduction in safety events,” Stockmeier said. “When you embrace safety and high reliability in that way, you can truly transform.”
There are currently 350 facilities participating in the HPI PSO, she added. Since Safety 2025 was announced at an internal meeting in November, “we’ve received hundreds of inquiries.”
“We’ll take as many as we can get,” said Gandhi, Press Ganey’s chief safety and transformation officer.
Gandhi noted that the Institute for Healthcare Improvement will be introducing its national action plan for the prevention of harm in May. “We see this aligning with that.”
Previous patient safety campaigns like the IHI’s 100,000 Lives and the Patient Safety Movement Foundation’s Zero Preventable Deaths by 2020 both made progress in raising awareness.
“Certainly we’ve recognized other campaigns,” said Stockmeier. “For us to see true transformation in the healthcare industry, I think that collaboration and alignment is imperative.”
Since the Institute of Medicine released the pivotal report To Err Is Human in 1999, the healthcare industry has undergone great change, including the adoption of safety teams and programs, reporting systems, safety culture, and high reliability, said Gandhi.
“We still have a long way to go,” she noted. “We know that harm is happening at rates that are too high…You have to focus on building the foundation that will drive improvements across the board.”
This Press Ganey initiative hopes to continue those efforts, Stockmeier said. “We’re primed for how we can take the industry to the next level.”
Healthcare has adopted high-reliability principles from the nuclear, aviation, and high-risk manufacturing industries, she said. “They’ve shown the importance of being systematic in high-reliability organizing.”
Learn more about Safety 2025 here.