Patient Safety in Office Practices

Mount Auburn Practice Improvement Project (MA-PIP)

Information for Physician Groups

Individuals and teams should use these materials to improve patient safety. To fully implement these videos and tools, the PROMISES Partners recommend using the curriculum coupled with practice coaches and a collaborative learning network to support the learning and maximize improvement. Learn from the materials offered here or contact the Coalition if you are a Massachusetts healthcare provider interested in developing your own patient safety program.

If you are a primary care provider or manager interested in developing a patient safety program for your organization, consider working with leaders in your organization, to evaluate the organization’s ability to:

• Recruit practices to implement a patient safety program
• Provide coaching resources to work with and encourage practices using regular visits and/or calls
• Provide opportunities for collaboration and sharing - regional meetings and/or webinars
• Use or adapt the PROMISES curriculum to train practices
• Assist in assessing practices — Information for Researchers (scroll down) includes tools for chart review and survey tools for patients and staff

For practices that have started their patient safety program and would like a broader change package of ideas, these and other resources are available for download on our site.

Information for Researchers

The PROMISES project utilized a diverse set of evaluation tools, including patient surveys, staff surveys, chart audits, qualitative exit interviews and analysis of practice change management.

As a result of this work, the PROMISES project has published, “Primary Care Closed Claims Experience of Massachusetts Malpractice Insurers” in JAMA Internal Medicine as well as “Doing Right By Our Patients When Things Go Wrong in the Ambulatory Setting” in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.

The Administrator Survey, Patient Survey, and Staff Survey tools are based on validated AHRQ resources. To assist practices in understanding the data from their surveys, the PROMISES evaluation team created reports to compare each practice’s results against peers

In addition, the Chart Review Instrumentcreated by the PROMISES evaluators was based on an office practice evaluation tool developed by leading medical malpractice insurers. Focusing on high risk patients with abnormal results, chart review provided insight to potential errors.

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