Special to the Tribune-Star
INDIANAPOLIS — Medical errors may kill as many as 98,000 people each year, making them one of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. To accelerate breakthrough safety improvement in Indiana, health care providers and others from numerous industries will gather Tuesday at the Westin Indianapolis for a Patient Safety Summit to explore how to make Indiana an even safer place to receive health care.
“We’re looking to leverage our collective power to protect patients,” said Betsy Lee, director of the Indiana Patient Safety Center. “Indiana is uniquely positioned to lead such an effort, having rich resources in medical manufacturing, health information technology, and academia.”
According to Lee, patient safety efforts have been mostly isolated within industries. The summit will be a first step toward aligning the work and creating a statewide vision to accelerate the pace of change.
The meeting comes on the heels of a report late last month from the think tank Resources for the Future, which found that pneumonia and bloodstream infections caught in U.S. hospitals killed 48,000 patients and cost $8.1 billion in 2006. The report studied discharge records from 69 million patients at hospitals in 40 states between 1998 and 2006. It focused on hospital-acquired pneumonia and sepsis.
Once again Indiana is out in front of the rest of the nation on the issue of patient safety in health care settings. In 2006, Indiana became the second state in the country to launch a mandatory medical error reporting system.
Local and national efforts to improve patient safety have also escalated during the last decade. In addition to the Indiana Patient Safety Center, Indiana now has six regional safety coalitions located in Indianapolis and Evansville, as well as the north central, west central, northeast, and northwest regions of the state.
What does that 48,000 patient death toll mean?
It is more than three times greater than the 14,137 murder victims in the U.S. in 2008; just under three times greater than the 17,011 U.S. citizens who died from AIDS in 2007 and about 15 percent higher than the estimated 40,460 Americans who died of breast cancer in 2007.
Against that grim backdrop, Indiana healthcare experts are acting to turn the tide against infection by sharing best-practice approaches.
“Hospitals, manufactures, legislators, and educators are all engaged in patient safety,” said Douglas Leonard, president of the Indiana Hospital Association. “We’ve made incremental improvements, but our patients deserve widespread, transformative change.”
Attendees will be coming from all corners of the state. National speakers include John Nance, a pioneer in aviation safety, and Dr. Robert Wachter, one of the nation’s top safety experts and a leader in the “hospitalist” movement.
A physician panel will discuss new technologies to prevent health care acquired infections, including use of antibiotic-impregnated catheters. Another panel will feature Indiana case studies on the use of simulation training and telemedicine to improve safety.
