Each year, five million people in the U.S. are hospitalized in one of the most complex and costly settings in health care: the intensive care unit. During their stay, there is significant risk of experiencing preventable harms. This includes medical harms, such as infections, but it also includes how people are treated in the hospital. Too often patients and their families experience a lack of dignified and respectful treatment. We also view these as harms, and harms that can be prevented.
Today, the ICU, and other hospital settings, are not optimally designed to prevent many harms from occurring. Evidence-based practices are not always put into action; data is not always converted into knowledge at the point of care; communication gaps occur across the clinical care team and with the patient and their family; and hospital rooms and processes are not engineered well. As a result, clinicians are not able to consistently deliver the quality of care patients and their families need or want.
Our goal is to change this by partnering with experts inside
and outside the health profession to tackle the complexities of our health care delivery system. We are working with some of the most progressive medical centers recognized for their work in quality, safety and patient engagement, and we are pairing them with engineering and
technology institutions known for transforming industries - from MIT to the Applied Physics Lab.
Together, they are designing, testing and implementing new innovations and approaches that are altering how care is delivered. Hospitals throughout the country can learn from their experiences and leverage their innovations to eliminate preventable harms and deliver safer, more compassionate health care.