Congressional Briefing on Patient Safety Underscores the Need for the National Patient Safety Board
Type: News
Focus Area: Patient Safety
Pictured: Leah Binder (upper left), Academy Health President and CEO Dr. Aaron Carroll (upper right), Dr. Kristin Miller (lower left), and Dr. Paul Tang (lower right).
On August 8, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and AcademyHealth held a Congressional briefing on patient safety.
During the hearing, Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, provided an overview of the current state of patient safety in the United States and the need for a federal home for patient safety.
Dr. Paul Tang, adjunct professor at the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University and a practicing internist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, gave a presentation about what health care can learn from aviation to make its systems safer for patients by bringing a data-driven, scalable approach to preventing and reducing harms in health care.
Dr. Kristin Miller, DrPH, MSL, MSPH, CPPS, senior scientific director at the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, co-director of the MedStar Center for Diagnostic Systems Safety, and associate professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine discussed the importance of integrating human factors and AI to enhance safety in healthcare settings, emphasizing the ways AI and predictive systems can complement the expertise of clinicians to save lives.
The trio of presentations underscored the need for a National Patient Safety Board to support research and implement new safety solutions. All three speakers talked about the importance of nonpunitive government engagement in patient safety, modeling the work of the National Transportation Safety Board, underscoring its ability to support research and recommend new safety solutions.
Innovator Reetam Ganguli, a machine learning researcher and entrepreneur, also commented at the hearing, expressing the difficulty of getting tech-enabled solutions into health systems and the hands of practitioners. His experience bringing Elythea, a company that identifies the risk factors that are otherwise undetected until later stages of pregnancy, is highlighted in the Jewish Healthcare Foundation’s recent documentary film, The Pitch: Patient Safety's Next Generation.
The National Patient Safety Board Act to establish a federal entity dedicated to improving patient safety and reducing preventable medical errors in the healthcare system was reintroduced on March 8, 2023 by U.S. Reps. Barragán and Burgess.
Learn more about the bill here.