Foundation promises $500M for patient safety effort; Starts with $9M Hopkins grant

A foundation has promised to spend $500 million over the next decade on hospital safety to try to prevent patient harm. The first $9 million will fund a project at Johns Hopkins to develop tools to eliminate common threats in hospitals.

The Wall Street Journal: Big Grant Aims To Help Patients Maintain Dignity
A large health care grant unveiled Tuesday is aimed at tackling an often overlooked side effect of hospital care: the loss of dignity that afflicts particularly sick patients. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, created by the Intel Corp. founder and his wife, plans to award $500 million to hospitals over the next decade with the lofty aim of eliminating all preventable harms done to patients in acute-care settings. The targets include the infections patients pick up inside the hospital and other complications that could have been avoided through more systematic monitoring of patients (Adamy, 8/28).

Modern Healthcare: Charity Group Plans $500 Million Patient-Care Campaign
A Palo Alto, Calif.-based philanthropic organization has launched a 10-year campaign aimed at eliminating preventable harm and empowering patients and their families. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, whose grants fund projects in patient care, science and environmental conservation, announced in an Aug. 28 news release its Patient Care Program. The foundation says it expects to funnel as much as $500 million into the program over the next decade (McKinney, 8/28).

The Associated Press: Project Taps Engineers, Families For Hospital Safety
Hospitals are rife with infections and opportunities for medical mistakes. Now, a nearly $9 million project at Johns Hopkins University aims to combine engineering with the power of patients and their families to prevent some of the most common threats. The idea: Design patient safety to be more like a car's dashboard, which automatically signals drivers when the oil needs changing or if a passenger forgot to buckle up, or like the countdown systems that make sure no step is missed when a satellite is launched (Neergaard, 8/28).

Kaiser Health News: Capsules: New Hospital Safety Effort To Link ICU Machines
Peter Pronovost's reputation as a health care safety maven was built on his success in getting doctors and nurses to think more systematically about avoiding hospital infections from catheters by using checklists. Now Pronovost is trying to see if the machines in hospital intensive care units can be taught to communicate with each other to avoid errors that hurt or kill patients (Rau, 8/28).