PRHI Board Remains Laser Focused on Patient Safety and Innovation

At its March 12 Board meeting, the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI) welcomed five new Board members, who bring diverse experience to their new roles. Owen Cantor, DMD, is retired from practice at Chestnut Hills, and is a seasoned Osher course leader in Pittsburgh and beyond. David Kalson, JD, of Dentons Cohen & Grigsby, PC. David Goldberger, MA, brings extensive experience in healthcare delivery consulting and is a specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting. Ari Lightman, MBA, MSc, is a Distinguished Service Professor in Media and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. Jonas Johnson, MD, is the Emeritus Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, and helps run the UPMC Head & Neck Cancer Survivorship Clinic

Looking toward 2025, PRHI’s priority is to activate older adults to protect themselves against medical harm. PRHI is looking to achieve this by focusing its policy agenda on the long- and short-term waste and cost created by medical errors; focusing on elevating direct-to-consumer education and products for self-protection; creating senior-focused communications about medical harm, including a OSHER Lifelong Learning course at CMU on patient safety this spring; and boldly communicating the connection between medical errors and reduced health span.

The meeting also showcased an exciting evolution of PRHI’s popular Patient Safety Technology Challenge for 2025. This year, the Challenge will focus its events on direct-to-consumer safety tech, providing education and guidance to past competition awardees with the expertise of advisory members.

The upcoming Patient Safety Fellowship will focus on challenging fellows to reach and engage different populations in self-protection, including seniors and caregivers, pregnant people, people living with HIV/AIDS, and people living with mental health issues. Applications for this year’s Fellowship are open, with applications due by May 5.

Teconomy Partners, which is conducting a study on self-directed patient safety technology and Pittsburgh’s potential role in its development and commercialization, provided the Board with a mid-project update on its findings. As part of the broader effort to position Pittsburgh as a global leader in autonomous patient safety technologies, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and PRHI launched the Regional Autonomous Patient Safety (RAPS) initiative in 2022, identifying this study as a way to further identify an economic opportunity and emerging cluster for the region.