PRHI Welcomes Coalition for Advancing Patient Safety Partners for Updates
Type: News
Focus Area: Patient Safety
PRHI Board discusses initial suggestions made by CASH research groups.
The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI) Board met November 17 to hear the latest progress from the Coalition for Advancing Safer Healthcare (CASH), a multi-institution partnership organized by PRHI to build a model of an ideal yet feasible health system of the future.The meeting was designed not only to review work to date but also to help steer the coalition’s next steps as it accelerates practical, scalable strategies to prevent harm before it happens.
Since launching earlier this year, CASH has been charged with producing concrete recommendations across four strategic areas: large-scale health system technology, human-factors–engineered solutions, data for improvement, and direct-to-consumer safety tools. Its goal is to move beyond isolated pilots toward systemwide adoption that offers measurable safety gains and compelling financial justification for health systems and payers. With that mandate in mind, partner hub chairs and technical advisors came together to share early proposals, discuss business-case strategies, and gather Board feedback on how best to engage national stakeholders moving forward.
Top row left to right: Ken Catchpole, Michael Rosen, Robert El-Kareh. Bottom row left to right: Michael McShea, Raj Ratwani, David Classen.
The first presentation was made by Raj Ratwani, PhD, who leads the Human-Factors Engineered Solutions work group at MedStar Health. His team, representing a broad range of clinical, academic, and industry expertise, is focused on identifying human-factors safety solutions with both feasibility and measurability.
Michael Rosen, MA, PhD, of Johns Hopkins Medicine, described how his work group is identifying both emerging and existing technologies, including digital infrastructure, automation, AI, data science, and system-level platforms, that have the potential to strengthen diagnostic accuracy and improve reliability across the care continuum. His 26-member team reflects a spectrum of system leaders, clinicians, technologists, and quality experts, all of whom are helping to prioritize the proposals now under review.
The Board then heard from Rob El-Kareh, MD, MPH, MS, representing UC San Diego Health’s Data for Improvement work group. He described two overarching strategies: extracting more value from data the healthcare system already generates and cultivating new, affordable sources of information.
David Classen, MD, MS, of University of Utah Health, described the momentum behind direct-to-consumer (DTC) patient safety solutions. Their advisory group includes national leaders from the patient-advocacy movement, many of whom were motivated by serious harm events experienced either personally or by loved ones. Their early discussions have focused on how consumer-facing tools, including patient portals, AI-driven apps, home-monitoring technology, and other digital supports, can help patients detect risks, catch errors, and navigate complex care environments.
As the presentations naturally turned toward financial considerations, Michael McShea, MBA, MS, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory explained his work to build a comprehensive business case for patient safety across the Ambition Health System. He underscored the staggering cost of medical harm, which is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and the inconsistent methods currently used to estimate those losses. McShea hopes to create a broad ROI model that can be used by all four partner hubs and scaled nationally.
The work groups’ efforts and recommendations will be presented in a White Paper to be released in the first half of 2026.
CASH represents an extraordinary opportunity to shape the future of patient safety, not through regulation, but through innovation, partnership, and a shared commitment to building systems where harm is anticipated and prevented.
