March 23, 2023

Safe Care Addresses CMS Focus on Patient Safety

On March 23, 2023 by Julie Apold

During National Patient Safety Awareness Week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) highlighted their renewed focus on patient safety because harm is still too common and often preventable in a blog published on its website. Progress in patient safety has significantly declined since the beginning of the pandemic erasing previous patient safety gains.

Safety science shows us that serious safety events are most often the result of issues with our systems; rarely are they the result of one individual error.  CMS mentions several efforts going forward to drive systems improvements across programs:

• Incentivizing health care providers to make meaningful improvements – rewarding patient safety improvements; penalizing when standards are unmet.
• Issuing guidance to implement an effective, data-driven quality assessment and performance improvement program – including tracking and monitoring medical errors.
• Updating requirements for providers who participate in Medicare and Medicaid to better address inequities in quality of care and access.

Safe Care addresses CMS-highlighted patient safety best practices

The LeadingAge Minnesota quality initiative – Safe Care, which is grounded in safety science – provides resources to address the best practices mentioned by CMS (and other vital practices) in the re-engineering of safe systems of care by:

• Ensuring a culture of safety
• Improving teamwork and communications
• Carefully analyzing errors [and near misses] to identify root causes
• Improving patient and caregiver engagement

Learn more about Safe Care

As CMS renews its focus on patient safety, it is an excellent time to re-evaluate our culture and systems to continue working toward our Safe Care goal of eliminating preventable harm during caregiving. To get started (or restarted) on your Safe Care journey, explore the following tools:

• About Safe Care
• Implement the 5 Safe Care Actions
• Safe Care Virtual Workshop
• Take the Safe Care Pledge

Contact Julie Apold, Vice President of Quality & Performance Excellence, to learn more.