The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines patient safety culture as "the extent to which an organization's culture supports and promotes patient safety." Patient safety culture is influenced by the values, beliefs and norms of healthcare practitioners and other staff. Since these concepts tend to be abstract, organizations looking to improve their patient safety culture must focus on identifying and measuring patient safety-related behaviors.  In this introductory blog, we'll touch on the importance of patient safety data and how it can help create a baseline. From there, you can gain a clearer idea of how to benchmark your facility to create effective patient safety culture improvement strategies.  Why collect patient safety data?  The best way to examine patient safety culture at the department, organization and system levels is to measure data. An organization can implement many different patient safety culture strategies. However, for them to be most...

Assessing the needs of a community — through preparation, coordination and implementation — does more than check a box. It provides hospitals with insight into where time, money and resources should be dedicated to improve population health. This is the purpose of the Community Health Needs Assessment. Per the American Hospital Association’s guide , the CHNA includes multiple moving parts and contributors who: interview community leaders; hold stakeholder meetings; conduct patient surveys and query results; establish and participate in community focus groups; and analyze population health metadata. These steps can be time-consuming and unclear, leaving many to question whether they’re accurately evaluating their community’s needs — or just trying to meet compliance requirements. But, what if there’s a better way? In this blog, we’ll break down three steps you can use to simplify your CHNA, so you can drive the best outcomes for patients and providers. Three ways to simplify the CHNA 1....