Letter from the Chief Medical Officer
Dear Colleagues:
We pride ourselves on delivering the safest care to some of the sickest and neediest patients, and we are among the leaders in measuring, quantifying and publicly reporting safety and outcome data. The ultimate measure of patient safety and outcomes remains our mortality rate.
Improving our mortality rate is our top priority every year, and this year we have a number of efforts geared towards improving the survival rates for our patients. One element of this multi-faceted attack is our Rapid Response System (RRS), which we began rolling out in several non-ICU inpatient units in the Tower, Connors Center and the Shapiro Center in recent months. We expect this effort to extend hospital-wide by March.
At BWH, RRS formalizes on an institutional level our efforts to provide multidisciplinary clinical care at the bedside to non-ICU patients showing signs of new deterioration. This system, which is available 24 hours per day, immediately brings a first-responding physician or physician assistant, a critical nurse and a respiratory therapist to a patient to prevent that patient from needing to be transferred to an ICU or having a cardiac arrest. Through RRS, we are providing consistent infrastructure to bring additional resources to our bedside clinicians with an institutional sense of urgency.
The Center for Clinical Excellence is tracking and analyzing data relative to RRS activations, and all clinicians involved in RRS events are encouraged to provide feedback during group debriefings. Data and analysis relative to RRS in hospitals across the country and internationally are evolving, but we will be in a position to better track the successes of our RRS events and identify areas for improvement.
Jeffrey M. Rothschild, MD, of the Department of Medicine, and Diane Lancaster, PhD, RN, director of Quality Measurement and Improvement in the Department of Nursing, are co-chairing the rollout of RRS across BWH, with a lot of help from Karen Griswold, MBA, RN, a senior consultant in the Center for Clinical Excellence. Thanks to their efforts, we are close to going hospital-wide with RRS and meeting a new standard now required by the Joint Commission.
The success of this effort, and our success is reducing our mortality rate, will come from all our clinicians working together to care for our patients.