How to Use Data to Improve Patient Safety

Avoiding patient harm is intrinsic to the work of healthcare professionals. Hippocrates (ca. 460–377 BCE), known as the Father of Modern Medicine, helped set this precedent when he said, “The physician must…have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.” Contemporary medicine, however, still struggles to realize its primary mission. Today, researchers estimate that one in three hospitalized patients experiences preventable harm and over 400,000 individuals per year die from these injuries.

There is a gap in healthcare safety culture and the way health systems uses data (or think they use data) to understand patient harm and what to do about it. Much of the data collection is manual and not integrated with financial, operational, and other data, resulting in a fragmented approach to safety analytics that’s not actionable or predictive. Scores are recorded and boxes are checked, but the real work to make patients safer—closing the loop between information and action—is incomplete.