The new leader of an Orange County-based patient safety movement is calling for more employer involvement as participants get ready for an annual conference slated to take place in Irvine this month.
Jim Bialick is using a financial argument and the humanitarian case the Patient Safety Movement Foundation promotes in the healthcare industry. Preventable deaths come with big healthcare bills that eventually are passed on to businesses and taxpayers.
“There are [an estimated] 200,000 to 400,000 deaths each year from preventable medical errors,” said Bialick, who signed on as president of the Irvine-based foundation last year. “That is $900 billion pushed onto insurers and Medicare.”
The foundation is the brainchild of Irvine-based Masimo Corp. Chief Executive Joe Kiani, who several years ago took up the challenge of convincing fellow medical device makers to share data from various monitors and other products.
Goal
The stated goal is to avoid complications such an infections, adverse drug reactions, patient falls and bed sores—all of which can lead to otherwise preventable deaths of patients in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
The patient safety movement aims to eliminate all preventable deaths in American hospitals by 2020.
The movement wants medical technology companies to share data and hospitals to commit to establishing patient safety standards.
“Improving patient safety will require a collaborative effort from all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government, employers and private payers,” the foundation’s mission statement proclaims.
Bialick joined the foundation as president in May, succeeding Sheila Creal, who remains on the foundation’s board. He became familiar with the organization after attending patient safety summits in 2013 and this year.
The movement grew out of a summit that Masimo and Kiani had in early 2013 under the banner of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Health Care.
Participants
Some of the medical device companies involved in the movement include:
• GE Healthcare, a British unit of Stamford, Conn.-based General Electric Co.;
• Philips Medical, a unit of Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics NV that Masimo sells patient monitoring technology to;
• Kansas City-based electronic medical records vendor Cerner Corp.;
• And Dräger Medical Inc., a maker of patient monitors that is a unit of Lübeck, Germany-based Drägerwerk AG & Co.
From the hospital side, Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian and Children’s Hospital of Orange County are supporters.
And former President Bill Clinton, who has been with the movement since its early stages, will return to speak at this year’s summit, scheduled for Jan. 23 and 24 at the Hotel Irvine.
Newborn Foundation
Bialick’s background includes spending the past four years serving as cofounder and executive director of the Newborn Foundation and Newborn Coalition in Washington, D.C.
The Newborn Foundation promotes the use of technology to improve the quality and safety of healthcare for newborn babies domestically and internationally.
Much of the foundation’s time was spent on drafting, advocacy and passage of more than 30 state laws requiring newborns to be screened for congenital heart disease.
“We [authored] 36 bills—we passed 33 of them,” Bialick said of his activity with Newborn Foundation.
Bialick’s experience in Washington was a key to his hire as the foundation sought a leader who would continue its efforts to work with the private sector.
His “proven leadership skills will be key to get more medical technology companies to make pledges and more hospitals to make commitments to improve patient safety and save lives,” said Kiani, who is chairman of the foundation Bialick said Kiani’s a constant advocate for the foundation.
“Everywhere he goes, he talks the patient safety movement,” he said.
The rest of the group’s board—with members ranging from hospital executives to medical device bosses to physicians—is a “microcosm of a coordinated health system,” Bialick said.
Sharing Data
Employer involvement is only one of Bialick’s concerns, however. Shortly after he became the foundation’s president, he tackled the issue of making sure information technology can share patient data between healthcare organizations—one of the patient safety movement’s goals. The ability to share is known as interoperability.
“The patient safety movement believes that device and [electronic health record] interoperability is key to developing patient safety systems that can aid healthcare professionals in their clinical decision making to stop threats to patient safety before they happen,” Bialick told industry newsletter InformationWeek.
Interoperability was “too important to take at face value or rely on patches,” according to Bialick.
“It is time that we took a close look at all of this. Interoperability, at its core, is a patient safety issue. Interoperability is central to realizing the promise of health IT and that extends beyond sending records back-and-forth, point-to point,” Bialick said.
