National Leaders Unveil a Vision for the Future of Patient Safety

What if we could build the safest health system possible from scratch? That's the question posed by Safe By Design: Reimagining Health Care Around the Prevention of Harm, a new white paper that introduces the fictional yet realistic Ambition Health System as a blueprint for designing health care around the prevention of harm rather than reacting to it.

Prepared by the Coalition for Advancing Safer Healthcare (CASH), an initiative convened by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) and the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), Safe By Design moves beyond incremental improvements to today's fragmented healthcare system. Instead, it offers expert-informed recommendations that health system leaders can begin implementing now. At a time when artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and workforce challenges are reshaping health care, the report provides a timely framework to help boards and executives keep patient safety at the forefront.

Developed through the leadership of CASH's four partner hubs—the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins University, the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation at UC San Diego Health, and The University of Utah Center for Evaluation of Health AI—the report also draws on the expertise of more than 100 national leaders in patient safety, healthcare delivery, technology, policy, and patient advocacy.

Rather than asking how existing systems can be improved, Ambition Health System poses a more fundamental question: If we could build the safest health system possible from scratch, what would it look like? The recommendations are intended to help health system leaders work toward a future where safety is intentionally designed into every aspect of care.

Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD, Alvin Rogal President and CEO Emeritus of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, echoed that vision: “We have the capacity to move beyond treating harm as inevitable and instead design systems that anticipate and prevent errors, and continuously improve. The Ambition Health System was created by many experts in patient safety to apply a wide range of proven interventions to give patients, families, and the workforce as failsafe a health system as possible. The challenge now is to make this vision of the ideal a reality.”

As Joanne M. Conroy, MD, president and CEO of Dartmouth Health, observed, “Most of our systems evolved over decades, adding piecemeal technologies, processes, regulations, and workarounds along the way. That’s why I think the Ambition Health System concept is so timely and important.”

Safe by Design builds on years of work to advance the creation of a National Patient Safety Board (NPSB), a concept designed to prevent harm before it occurs. While a national board has yet to be established, CASH is moving that vision forward by convening leading experts to identify and recommend the systems, technologies, and governance practices health systems can implement today. If health system boards, executives, clinicians, and patient advocates embrace these recommendations, they can accelerate the transformation of patient safety.

“As we head into this era of modern technologies, we have a risk of environments becoming more complex and maybe more dangerous. Now more than ever is the perfect time to get behind CASH,” said Amir Dan Rubin, MBA, MHSA, the CEO and founding managing partner of Healthier Capital.

Access the report here.