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Patient Safety Centers

The Maryland Patient Safety Center is a collaboration of the Maryland Hospital Association and the Delmarva Foundation formed in mid-2004 to work to prevent hospital-based errors. The Center's primary strategies include:

• Error Prevention - provider education and systems improvement including mandatory reporting of serious adverse events, provider report cards and disciplinary boards
  
  
• Collaboration and Education - training and workshops to share knowledge, best practices and lessons learned
  
  
• Voluntary Reporting - providers will voluntarily report errors to the Center in a confidential form

CareFirst will play a visible and substantive advisory role in the Center's educational efforts and future planning and will provide funding assistance. CareFirst will further seek to develop Patient Safety Centers in Delaware and the District of Columbia modeled on the Maryland Patient Safety Center.

CareFirst has budgeted significant seed money to develop these programs in concert with the hospital associations and the Delmarva Foundation.

Health Information Technology (HIT) Collaborative

The HIT Collaborative is a physician-led effort that involves hospital, health systems and other stakeholders, including payers. The goals of the HIT Collaborative are to work with Maryland and DC providers and health organizations to improve quality of care, patient safety and efficiency through health information technology. A pilot project is planned at Howard County General Hospital. The project will examine and validate that a "Common Data Exchange" system will improve the quality and safety of patient care, decrease overall costs, is economically sustainable, is adoptable by providers and identifies measurable and sustainable improvements. CareFirst has made a major contribution to this initiative. In Delaware, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware will continue to collaborate with the Delaware Health Information Network.

Hospital Safety: Intensive Care Initiatives

CareFirst is developing a proposal to partner with area hospitals to help them achieve patient safety and quality goals, placing initial emphasis on physician staffing in intensive care units. Potential program components include giving incentive payments to hospitals that expand their use of intensive care unit specialists known as "intensivists" and working to ensure that patients receive state-of-the-art intensive care. Details of this program will be developed in collaboration with hospital partners and will be announced later in 2005.

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