UC San Francisco (UCSF) health system and The Doctors Company, a physician-owned medical malpractice insurer, are teaming up on a $1 million collaboration that aims to make substantive advances in patient safety and digital health through research and engagement.
As officials of the two organizations detailed in a press release announcement, widespread digitization of the healthcare system over the past decade—including electronic health records (EHRs), apps, and sensors—offers new ways to study and address traditional patient safety challenges such as diagnostic and medication errors.
But with the digital health revolution comes new challenges that stem directly from these emerging capabilities, including how to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) tools into front-line care, mitigate alert fatigue, share data with patients, preserve the physician-patient relationship with increasing use of technology in the exam room and asynchronous communication tools, avoid physician burnout related to suboptimal EHR usability and performance, and ensure cybersecurity, officials noted.
As such, the UCSF team, which is led by two healthcare researchers—Julia Adler-Milstein, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, and Urmimala Sarkar, M.D., associate professor of medicine—will look to pursue critical questions regarding in evidence-based patient safety practices, safety and information technology–related policy, and artificial intelligence.
“The primary goal of the partnership is to discover and disseminate new insights into risk mitigation strategies and patient safety by connecting top-tier UCSF researchers and unique resources and expertise from The Doctors Company. It is a rare and exciting opportunity to have two such organizations come together to jointly advance such an important area,” Dr. Adler-Milstein said in a statement.
Robert Wachter, M.D., chair of UCSF’s Department of Medicine and a member of The Doctors Company’s Board of Governors, has championed this collaboration. “The Doctors Company insures 82,000 physicians in the U.S. and has a rare window into the causes of medical errors and strategies to mitigate them. By leveraging UCSF’s world-class research community, we believe that we can develop new insights into safety hazards and strategies to keep patients safe,” he said.
