ECRI recognizes Monument Health as recipient of 2022 Safety Excellence Award
ECRI, the nation’s largest nonprofit patient safety organization, has named Monument Health of Rapid City, SD, winner of the 2022 Safety Excellence Award. Monument Health is recognized for exceeding organization-wide safety goals of reducing harm and errors by improving culture of safety and event reporting.
The Safety Excellence Award recognizes a member of the joint ECRI and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) PSO for outstanding patient safety efforts and initiatives. Monument Health’s winning submission was selected based on a blinded panel review of four key criteria: impact, culture of safety, scale, and innovation.
“We applaud Monument Health for advancing patient safety through increased reporting and other process improvements,” says Dheerendra Kommala, MD, chief medical officer, ECRI. “Their success is notable because it comes amidst the backdrop of a global pandemic that has been especially difficult for most healthcare safety teams.”
Monument Health, a community-based health system, set a strategic goal to improve culture of safety, increase incident and near miss event reporting, and increase and enrich discussions about safety throughout the organization. Their efforts, which included implementation of a multi-prong Safety Culture program of tiered huddles, good catch reporting, Just Culture, and patient safety coaches, resulted in a 334% increase of near-miss reporting.
“This award is a product of Monument Health’s ongoing commitment to excellence in safety and quality at all levels,” says Merissa Cook, Monument Health’s director of quality, safety and risk management. “Our caregivers and physicians have worked to deliver care that is transparent, patient-centered and physician- and caregiver-driven and to continuously improve how we serve our communities.”
Monument Health, a member of the ECRI and the ISMP PSO, credits monthly meetings, event data analysis, and educational webinars and workshops as contributing factors to their overall success. ECRI’s Root Cause Analysis-in-Action: Building Foundations workshop helped Monument Health develop investigational processes that were free from bias and taught them how to solve failures at a sustainable systems level versus at an individual level.
Throughout their multi-year initiative, Monument Health used ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns report to support their strategy for prospective risk assessments and ISMP’s best practice recommendations to review serious safety event investigations related to medication safety.
The 2022 Safety Excellence Award ceremony took place at the ECRI and the ISMP PSO’s Annual Meeting, held virtually on November 2, 2022.
Two organizations received honorable mentions:
Carilion Clinic, Roanoke, VA | Created a new tool for use during the development of interventions associated with a patient safety event
Unity Point St. Luke’s, Cedar Rapids, IA | Improved overall program and management of the catheter-associated urinary tract infection prevention bundle
