Patient Safety
Performance Measures
Dana-Farber tracks a variety of performance measures to assess patient safety and quality of care, including our performance on Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goals and various internal metrics.
The Leapfrog Group
The Leapfrog Group is a consortium of Fortune 500 companies working to leverage improvements in healthcare quality and patient safety. Since 2004, the group has surveyed U.S. hospitals on their performance in four areas: 1) adoption of computer physician order entry (CPOE) systems; 2) use of referral hospitals that provide certain high-risk surgeries and treatments; 3) round-the-clock staffing of intensive care units with doctors and nurses trained in critical care medicine; and 4) implementation of 27 additional practices that can reduce the number of preventable medical errors.
Dana-Farber supports the Leapfrog Group's efforts to promote safe health care, and is pleased to participate in the Leapfrog safety survey. The survey encourages transparency in healthcare by providing consumers with information about safety practices at U.S. hospitals.
As a specialty hospital focusing exclusively on cancer treatment and research, some items in the survey do not apply to our organization. For example, Dana-Farber neither operates an intensive care unit, nor performs the high-risk surgeries. In completing the survey, we applied materials provided by the Leapfrog Group (and the National Quality Forum) to assess, as best we could, our own safety practices. While we have exceeded Leapfrog standards in many areas — we were an early developer and adopter of computerized chemotherapy order entry systems, for example — we also identified several opportunities to advance our ongoing efforts in teamwork training, disclosure education, safety culture, and anticoagulation monitoring through this process.
For more information on Dana-Farber's Leapfrog survey self-assessment, please contact Brett Simchowitz at brett_simchowitz@dfci.harvard.edu, or at (617) 632-4922.
