Apr 18, 2013, 8:00 AM, Posted by Pioneer Blog Team
In this video, Helen Darling of The National Business Group on Health explains how employers will benefit from the Global Cardiovascular Risk (GCVR) score, a new quality improvement tool aimed at reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Feb 25, 2013, 12:33 PM, Posted by Pioneer Blog Team
Jamie Heywood
Paul Tarini
RWJF has awarded PatientsLikeMe a $1.9 million grant to create the world’s first open-participation research platform to develop patient-centered health outcomes. The new platform will be linked with the PatientsLikeMe network to help researchers develop health outcome measures that better reflect patients’ experiences with a disease, and assess health and quality of life in ways that matter to patients.
Jamie Heywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, and Paul Tarini, senior program officer of the Pioneer Team at RWJF, share their views on why creating an open-access platform to develop measures that matter to patients could advance meaningful treatments that improve health and advance research.
Why is this a pioneering project? What makes it novel?
Dec 5, 2012, 9:18 AM, Posted by Mike Painter
Michael Painter
A little more than 13 years ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its seminal report on patient safety, To Err is Human. You can say that again. We humans sure do err. It seems to be in our very nature. We err individually and in groups—with or without technology. We also do some incredible things together. Like flying jets across continents and building vast networks of communication and learning—and like devising and delivering nothing- short-of-miraculous health care that can embrace the ill and fragile among us, cure them, and send them back to their loved ones. Those same amazing, complex accomplishments, though, are at their core, human endeavors. As such, they are inherently vulnerable to our errors and mistakes. As we know, in high-stakes fields, like aviation and health care, those mistakes can compound into catastrophically horrible results. The IOM report highlighted how the human error known in health care adds up to some mindboggling numbers of injured and dead patients—obviously a monstrous result that nobody intends.
The IOM safety report also didn’t just sound the alarm; it recommended a number of sensible things the nation should do to help manage human error. It included things like urging leaders to foster a national focus on patient safety, develop a public mandatory reporting system for medical errors, encourage complementary voluntary reporting systems, raise performance expectations and standards, and, importantly, promote a culture of safety in the health care workforce.