OSF Healthcareʼs Journey in Patient Safety

Abstract

This article describes OSF Healthcare's recent journey in patient safety. It discusses the involvement of its 6 hospitals in collaboration with each other and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. OSF focused on a strategy for decreasing adverse drug events (ADEs). They worked on impacting 4 major areas: safety culture, high-risk medication, dispensing of medication, and medication reconciliation. By doing this, OSF decreased its rate of ADEs per 1000 units of medication administered from 3.84 to 1.39 over the course of 20 months.