Patient Safety Research Program

Ensuring that patients are diagnosed correctly and get the right treatments at the right time is central to high-quality health care delivery. Unfortunately, despite nationwide efforts to reduce errors and improve care quality, preventable harm continues to occur. While Saint Alphonsus employs practices shown to be effective in increasing patient safety, there remains a need to conduct research to identify new ways to improve the quality of care and the safety of our patients.

Program Goals

Established in 2011, Trinity Health's Patient Safety Research program is a collaboration of Trinity Health, Saint Alphonsus Health System, Trinity Health regional health ministries, and academic partners. The goal of the program is to conduct and disseminate research related to improvement in health care systems with a focus on improving patient safety and increasing care quality for all. The Patient Safety Research Program places special emphasis on research that will ensure equality of care and benefit the poor, vulnerable, and underserved. The program is primarily guided by user-centered theories and methods stemming from the multi-disciplinary field of Human Factors Engineering. These methods guide the design and evaluation of systems that are focused on the needs, capabilities, and limitations of patients and clinicians to support effective, efficient, and error-free performance. In addition to a focus on generalizable research, the Program is involved in the translation of research findings to development and implementation in health care delivery systems, training, processes, and technologies.

Research Project Areas

Health Care Information Presentation. Clinicians are suffering from information overload. We are working to better format, organize and prioritize the presentation of patient information to ensure effective and timely care decisions.

Patient Monitoring and Early Detection of Patient Deterioration. We are working on developing tools and processes to support early detection and response to patient deterioration and emergencies, which is critical to better patient outcomes and reduced costs.

In-Hospital Safety. We target the reduction of adverse events (AEs) in the hospital setting such as medication errors and wrong patient/wrong-site events.

Perioperative Safety. Projects centered on safety in the perioperative environment include improving the design of intra-operative alarm systems, reducing errors related to "forgetting" tasks in anesthesia care, and reducing gas leakage to prevent operating room fires.

Simulation and Innovative Healthcare Education and Assessment. We are developing innovative healthcare education techniques and assessment tools to support effective training across the continuum of care.

Program Expansion. New projects are under development to expand the scope of our work beyond the hospital environment toward the improvement of population health, care quality, access to care and equality of care.