$8.9M grant will be used to make ICU's safer for patients

Johns Hopkins has received an $8.9 million gift that it will use to make intensive care units safer for patients, Johns Hopkins Medicine reports. The award, from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, is part of a new $500 million, 10-year program designed to eliminate all preventable harms that patients experience in hospitals.

The Johns Hopkins grant will focus on hospital intensive care units, with the goal of preventing harms by better engaging patients—and their families—in their own care, making them an integral part of the health care team. The Hopkins group's aim is also to improve outcomes by using a systems engineering approach to health care, leveraging technologies and creating better processes to ensure patients always receive the therapies and treatments they need and that clinicians work as effectively and efficiently as possible. The grant will provide further impetus to earlier groundbreaking patient safety work by the director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, Peter J. Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., the senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

"Despite heroic efforts by clinicians, patients continue to suffer preventable harm, in large part because health care is grossly under-engineered: Devices don't talk to each other, treatments are not specified and ensured, and outcomes are largely assumed rather than measured," Pronovost says. "This project will seek to change that by enlisting systems engineers to ensure patients always get the treatments they should, by engaging patients in every aspect of their care and creating a health care system that continuously improves."