Hello, Columbus

I am currently in Columbus, Ohio, where I was invited to be one of two keynote speakers on quality and safety issues at the Central Ohio Patient Safety Conference. This is an annual conference organized by a number of hospitals in the area who decided years ago that "we compete on everything, but we don't compete on safety."

The other keynote speaker is one of my heroes, Robert Wachter, who is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Bob is a leader in patient safety. In 2004 he received the John M. Eisenberg Award, the nation’s top honor in patient safety, and his 2008 book, Understanding Patient Safety, received stellar reviews and is already in its 2nd printing. He also writes a great blog.


This is a serious conference, with about 500 doctors, nurses, and others focused on ways to reduce harm to patients. And these folks have produced results. The chart above gives just one indication, showing improvement in care to heart failure patients. At one point, the chairman asked half the people in the audience to stand up to demonstrate the number of lives saved in just the last year for this group of hospitals, just with regard to one of the metrics collected.

Here are some of the people who attended. They were wonderful hosts to this interloper from the East Coast!