Patient Safety Guidelines

• Guidelines for Implementing a Patient Safety Program in All Settings of Care
  A 7 page guideline that provides a generic, simple framework for initiating and maintaining a patient safety program in your setting of care.
• Doing Right by Our Patients When Things Go Wrong in the Ambulatory Setting
  A 4 page guideline that provides ambulatory leaders some of the skills and tools to handle challenging situations
• Strategies to improve communication between providers and patients during the office visit. Excerpted from a presentation by Leana Wen, MD, MSc

Case Studies

• Leadership Case Study
• Improvement Case Study
• Test Results Case Study
• Referrals Case Study

Improvement Tools/Sample Letters

• Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) form to guide practices through testing new ideas.
• Change Package includes a wide range of improvement ideas from which practices can choose.
• Patient Agenda Form is a basic tool to orient and guide a patient for a clinical visit that you might test, adapt and improve.
• Patient Agenda PDSA is a simple set of steps to help get started on using a patient agenda form that you might test, adapt and improve.
• Visit Summary Form provides a quick yet comprehensive summary for clinicians, staff and patients that you might test, adapt, and improve.
• Sample letter, encouraging the use of a bowel cancer screening test kit, which you might test, adapt and improve.
• Colonoscopy Referral Letter is a sample reminder letter, a follow up for a cancelled appointment and notification of missed appointment that you might test, adapt and improve.
• Controlled Substances Agreement provides a template to manage relationships and understanding between patients and their providers that you might test, adapt and improve.

Research/articles:

• An article on the rationale for and development of the guideline, Doing Right by Our Patients When Things Go Wrong in the Ambulatory Setting, appears in the February 2014 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
• Primary Care Closed Claims Experience of Massachusetts Malpractice Insurers The PROMISES project studied patterns of primary care malpractice types, causes, and outcomes as part of a retrospective review of pooled closed claims data from 2 malpractice carriers covering most Massachusetts physicians during a 5-year period (January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2009). The results are published in an article in JAMA Internal Medicine.