American College of Physician Executives offers new course for physicians to improve patient safety

When systems fail in the health care world, the results can be deadly. So creating the most reliable, safest system possible is always a priority. Now the American College of Physician Executives is offering a new course aimed directly at improving patient safety by helping physicians apply best practices from highly reliable organizations.

"The Science of High Reliability: Building Better Health Care" strives to teach physician leaders how to improve team performance at both the bedside and in the C-suite by improving understanding of highly reliable systems. The course focuses on the study of human performance in complex systems and includes systems thinking, techniques for minimizing waste and mistakes, analysis of serious safety events and tactics to create a culture where patient safety is the top priority.

The course follows the trend in health care toward creating evidence-based, reliable systems, as demonstrated by the recent move by the Joint Commission to create a new center for identifying and measuring poor quality and unsafe health care. The Center for Transforming Health Care will work with health care systems and hospitals to come up with new methods for eliminating dangerous breakdowns in patient care.

"The Science of High Reliability" builds on that initiative by teaching physician leaders the five behavior-shaping factors of reliable systems: structure, protocol, culture, process and intuitive environment. Participants learn to identify the types of waste and inefficiency in work processes and pick up techniques for reducing human error and system weaknesses.

Course objectives include:

• Defining reliability and describing how it can be measured and expressed.
• Learning how human error and system weaknesses combine to create dangerous situations.
• Applying the necessary steps to create culture change.
• Describing the process for selecting patient safety culture for a hospital, a service line and a single unit.
• Demonstrate understanding of research-based models for organizational change.

The course draws upon lessons learned at Toyota, a pioneer in building highly reliable systems.

Offered in an easy-to-use distance-learning format, participants can work at their own pace from their home or office computer. Faculty members are Craig Clapper, the chief operating officer for Healthcare Performance Improvement, and Jeff Norton, co-director for the Center for Enterprise Quality and Safety at the University of Kentucky.