At the recent 7th Annual Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation announced that MedStar’s David Mayer, M.D., will serve as the chief executive officer effective immediately, and that Baylor’s Michael Ramsay, M.D., was named chairman of the board effective after the 2020 Summit.
The Patient Safety Movement Foundation is a global nonprofit that creates free tools for patients and hospitals. It was established through the support of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare to reduce that number of preventable deaths to zero. The foundation claimed that 90,146 lives were saved in 2018, thanks to the efforts of more than 4,710 hospitals committing to patient safety, and 89 healthcare technology companies that have signed the open data pledge. A total of 273,077 lives have been saved since the first summit in 2013, the foundation said.
Dr. Mayer was one of the architects of CANDOR, which focuses on transparency, immediate root cause analysis and education and when implemented at MedStar has reduced preventable deaths by nearly 50 percent and saved the system $70 million. He also serves as the Executive Director of MedStar Institute for Quality and Safety and previously served for almost seven years as MedStar Health’s Vice President for Quality and Safety.
Dr. Ramsay is the Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Management at Baylor University Medical Center and President of Baylor Scott & White Research Institute. He is also a Professor at Texas A&M Health Science Center and holds a clinical professorship in anesthesiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School as well as in the Department of Periodontics at Baylor College of Dentistry, Texas A&M University. Dr. Ramsay is the developer of the Ramsay Sedation Scale, a measurement designed for interpreting the depth of sedation for patients in the critical care unit. This scale has been adopted around the world.
During his state of the movement address on the first day of the Summit, the Founder & Chairman of the Patient Safety Movement, Joe Kiani, reviewed the progress made to date and urged every hospital to implement all of the Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS). He stated, “To err is human, but to not put the proper patient safety processes in place is inhumane.”
Each year the foundation presents the Steven Moreau Humanitarian Award to a hospital administrator whose zeal for improving patient safety in their hospital is clearly prominent. This year the award was presented to William C. Wilson, M.D., M.A., Chief Medical Officer, UCI Health. Under his leadership, UCI Health in Orange, Calif., became the first academic medical center to obtain a 5-Star ranking under the Patient Safety Movement Foundation’s 5-Star Hospital Ranking Program in November 2018. In 2018, their commitments saved 16 lives. Dr. Wilson has worked to fully engage UCI Health’s clinical staff in creating a culture of safety for their patients and families.
The Beau Biden Humanitarian Award is normally presented to a government official who has improved patient safety, but this year it went to Julie Morath, R.N., M.S., president and CEO of the Hospital Quality Institute (HQI). She has helped spread transparency across the entire state of California and created a model for other states to follow. Under Morath’s leadership, HQI and the California Hospital Association encourage voluntary reporting on five hospital-acquired conditions: CLABSI, SSIs, sepsis, VTE, and maternal safety. In a year’s time, she was able to get 92 percent of California hospitals engaged, and 55 percent of them are publicly displaying this dashboard on their websites.
