PATIENT
SAFETY

A Real Problem Affecting Real People and Families 

What is patient safety?

Patient safety = protecting patients from harm​

  • Preventing Errors: In medications, care, and procedures.​

  • Reducing Risks: Like infections and diagnostic mistakes.​

  • Improving Systems: For safer outcomes for every patient.​
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It’s the foundation of trustworthy, high-quality healthcare.​

A New Era of Patient Safety

From Passive Recipients to Active Participants 

We can reimagine patient safety by shifting from clinical solutions to consumer-driven innovations. In a volatile healthcare environment, self-directed patient safety can equip consumers with the tools, technologies, and information they need to anticipate and prevent harm wherever they receive care. 

📣 We call on innovators to join us in creating the next generation of consumer-focused safety solutions.  

5 Problem Categories

Innovators should consider how they can put emerging technologies—such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, digital health tools, remote monitoring, mobile apps, wearable devices, predictive analytics, and more—into the hands of the consumer. The ideas should address the most common types of medical harm: 

  1. Medication-related – 44% of patient harm and injury 

  2. Medical Complications with Patient Care – 23% 

  3. Procedure/surgery-related – 22% 

  4. Infections – 11% 

  5. Diagnostic Errors 

The first four categories are drawn from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Global Trigger Tool (GTT). In addition to the IHI GTT categories, we believe diagnostic error also should also be considered, as it is a leading cause of preventable patient harm and death and spans the continuum of care, particularly primary care. Teams should be clear about what category their idea addresses.  

FOCUS AREAS FOR INNOVATION 

Empowering Patients and Families: Tools or platforms that help consumers understand and reduce risks in the categories above. 

Diagnostic safety: Interventions that improve diagnostic accuracy, engage patients in acquiring information about their conditions and test results, and increase access to ‘second opinions.’ 

Home-Based Safety Solutions: Innovations tailored to the home environment, such as smart devices or digital health tools that monitor health conditions, or provide early warnings of potential harm to patients 

Medication Error

Occurs when drugs are improperly prescribed, administered, or monitored, leading to adverse drug reactions, overdoses, or dangerous drug interactions.

Common types of harm events related to medication identified by the Office of the Inspector General include delirium or other change in mental status, hypotension, acute kidney injury, excessive bleeding and hypoglycemia.

PODCAST: A Health System That Won’t Learn From Its Mistakes (Health Affairs)

Infections

Refers to healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), like bloodstream infections, urinary infections, or pneumonia, which occur due to poor hygiene practices, unsterile equipment, or improper use of antibiotics.

Hundreds of millions of patients are affected by HAIs every year. It is estimated that 7 out of 100 hospitalized patients (7%) in high-income countries will acquire one or more HAIs, and that rate is even higher in low- and middle-income countries. Common types of harm events identified by the Office of the Inspector General include respiratory infections, surgical site infections, thrush, sepsis and C. diff infection.

Procedural/ Surgical Safety

Arises from errors or complications during surgery or medical procedures, such as wrong-site surgery, anesthesia errors, or leaving surgical instruments inside the patient.

More than one million patients die from complications due to surgery each year. Unsafe surgical procedures can cause complications in as many as 25% of patients. Common types of harm events identified by the Office of the Inspector General include hypotension, excessive bleeding, embolisms, cerebrovascular accidents, and prolonged ileus.

Patient Care

Includes failures in basic care practices and overlooked clinical deterioration from inadequate monitoring or support.

Patient care pertains to the daily care of patients, which is often performed by nurses. The Office of the Inspector General identified several common types of harmful events in their latest report. They include pressure injury, skin tears, abrasions and breakdowns, falls, fluid and electrolyte disorders, and intravenous catheter infiltration, burn or phlebitis.

Diagnostic Errors

Involves missed, delayed, or incorrect diagnoses, often leading to unnecessary treatments or worsening of a patient’s condition due to failure to identify the correct illness. 

According to the World Health Organization, inaccurate or delayed diagnosis is one of the most common causes of patient harm and affects millions of patients each year. Diagnostic errors, the failure to identify the nature of an illness in a timely and accurate manner, occur in about 5% of adults in the outpatient care setting in the United States. Medical record reviews have also revealed that diagnostic errors account for between 6% and 17% of harmful events in the hospital.

The Basics

We’ve pulled together the following resources to help you dive deeper into the topic of patient safety and help you understand the problem as you think about innovating.

Additional Stories

Here are some additional stories to help you understand the problem from the perspective of patients and patient advocates, including doctors who want to help.

Additional Patient Videos

  • Patients for Patient Safety US (PFPS US) has an excellent collection of patient stories here

Vignettes

TedX Talks

All of these videos are less than 15 minutes in length and relate to patient safety and medical error.

DOCUMENTARIES

Datasets

The following data sources may be helpful for data scientists and students looking to work on advanced analytics and AI-related projects.

General

Patient Safety Indicator Data

Medications

Devices

Doctor-Patient Encounters for Natural Language Processing

Cost and Utilization

Critical Care

Please note that access may be hard to obtain over a hackathon weekend. You must request access during a WEEKDAY.