By Healthcare Facilities Today

Memorial Hermann Healthcare System in Houston is on a mission eliminate health care-acquired infections, wrong medications/wrong doses, and all other mistakes that endanger patients, according to an article on the Hospitals & Health Networks magazine website. 

The seven-year-old crusade looks to the nuclear power and aviation industries for inspiration.

Memorial Hermann has had a focus on clinical quality metrics since 2002, but the new mission has its roots in two blood transfusion errors in 2006, two of a rash of medical mistakes that year. Within days of each other, one Memorial Hermann patient died and another was left in critical condition.

The project, called the From the Board to the Bedside Initiative, involves all 21,500 health system employees, including approximately 7,500 nurses and 5,400 affiliated physicians. The board has approved tens of millions of dollars in spending on the project, with patient safety now the system's only core value, according to the article.

As part of the initiative, Memorial Hermann centralized its quality departments, trained all employees off-site in the principles of high reliability, created and enforced the use of evidence-based protocols for most medical procedures, expanded its EHR to facilitate clinical decision support and rigorously documented performance with a dizzying array of data dashboards.

Read the article.