HCA takes safety ‘field trips’ to other industries

To increase patient safety, Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare takes staff on “field trips” to learn from other high-risk industries, such as chemical manufacturing, according to an American Hospital Association podcast published Sept. 3. 

Randy Fagin, MD, chief quality officer of HCA, said the system is on par and above healthcare industry metrics for patient safety. However, some high-risk industries are substantially safer than healthcare, including high speed rail, chemical manufacturing, general mechanical manufacturing, military aviation, and oil and gas, he said. 

In those industries, there are key lessons applicable to healthcare. 

“Safety is foundational. Like, you cannot achieve regulatory compliance without a foundation of safety,” said Dr. Fagin, who oversees the health system’s patient safety, regulatory compliance, clinical services lines, and claims insights and research. 

“Absent safety, your clinical outcomes cannot be what they need to be,” he said. “And with safety events you’re going to have higher medical liability claims against you. Safety becomes the ceiling that everything else kind of bumps itself up against.”

Best safety practices from other industries can be embedded into hospitals without changing operating models, according to Dr. Fagin. 

HCA assembled a team of employees working in safety, human resources, ethics compliance, nursing and other departments to participate in field trips. The excursions included a GE computed tomography manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, a DuPont Chemical facility in Delaware and the 160th Airborne Division, which provides helicopter aviation support for special operations forces.

“We’ve tried to spend time physically with and most often on-site with people who have created substantive levels of safety and performance and reliability to see what we can learn and how can we take those things that they do and bring that practical application back to healthcare,” Dr. Fagin said.

Listen to the podcast here.

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