There is growing evidence that the role of culture, especially the culture of patient safety, pays in an organization’s ability to improve and sustain those improvements over time. Improvement work is new to many leaders who find themselves in quality roles, and new improvement teams charged with harm elimination are often not familiar with the necessary tools to impact change.

Think back to 1999 when the Institute of Medicine released its game changing report To Err is Human… or the recent NPR programing on What Can Doctors Learn by Admitting Their Mistakes? Medicine’s culture of denial keeps doctors and staff from talking about and learning from those mistakes.

What can you do to course-correct for your organization? Participating in a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) creates a terrific opportunity for impacting—perhaps the greatest sea-change in health care of our time. This effort is dedicated to the elimination of preventable harm and improving the quality of health care delivery. With more than 300 participating hospitals, California’s PSO—CHPSO—is one of the largest in the nation and is collecting incident reports and other reports of patient safety issues in a legally protected manner, while maintaining patient and provider confidentiality and legal privilege. As a result, CHPSO obtains a larger view of potential patient hazards and is able to identify emerging risks and understand the cause and corresponding solutions.

Talking about what we, as hospitals, are doing wrong will lead us to learn and share meaningful, leading-edge practices that advance the triple aim of better care, better health, and lower costs. If you are not already familiar with work of the Hospital Quality Institute (HQI), now is a good time to engage. The institute consists of several programs focusing on quality improvement and patient safety. Each program works collaboratively to eliminate redundancy in reporting, allowing hospital staff to focus on improvement goals. Decreasing readmissions and health care-associated conditions through targeted interventions, benchmarking and spreading best practices should be at the top of everyone’s priorities.

Elimination of harm is achievable. One example of success can be seen in the outcomes of the Early Elective Deliveries (EED) effort. Through the work of HQI programs—Patient Safety First and CalHEN—and at the direction of CMS, the goal was set to reduce the EED rate at or below 3 percent statewide. A partnership was established with ACOG and direct interventions were developed; and direct consultation to physician and operation leaders throughout California rapidly occurred. Physician peer-to-peer learning was effective and eventually led to the implementation of a hard stop policy. PSF and CalHEN provided assistance to support hospital development of hard stop policies. If internal barriers were identified, ACOG provided influential physicians to work on-site with the hospital OB/GYN physician staff. By August 2013, 83 percent of birthing hospitals reported either a hard stop policy or an EED rate of below 3 percent.

Health care is undergoing rapid and profound change. Demonstrate your leadership to create a culture of respect, safety and reliability by participating in the upcoming Accelerate Excellence HQI Annual Conference November 6-7, 2014. With adequate leadership, attention, and resources, improvements can be made that can help achieve the triple aim of ACA and create a better and safer environment for patients while reducing the costs of care.