Reimagining the Future of Patient Safety, Together

“…You may say I’m a dreamer, but I am not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us."  – John Lennon

What if every health system, hospital and clinic wasn’t trying to figure out how to improve patient and workforce safety on its own? Can you imagine? It’s not a dream.

Health care safety leaders and many others know that our now 25-year-old safety movement, despite some progress, is stuck. As the complexity of our health care ecosystem exponentially increases, our movement needs recommitment as well as the willingness and humility to incorporate new ideas, make new investments, adopt new technology, and infuse new energy.

We also know that networks for learning and improvement have been demonstrating impressive results in both safety and clinical outcomes for more than a decade. These strategies are now poised to accelerate and expand in the next few years. Following are two examples of successful learning networks:

• In safety: the Children’s Hospitals' Solutions for Patient Safety network has accomplished tremendous results over the past 13 years. There are now 145 Children’s Hospitals across the US and Canada whose work together has achieved impressive outcomes: 31,000 children (and their families) have been spared from serious harm since the network’s inception in 2012, at a savings of more than $700 million.
• In clinical outcomes: the ImproveCareNow network has over 110 hospitals in the US and around the world working together to improve care for children, adolescents, and young adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Since its inception, the number of patients with IBD who are in remission and not on systemic steroids has increased from 60 percent to more than 80 percent. 

What is the “secret sauce” that these networks — and others like them — are using to accomplish these remarkable results? It’s not secret, and it’s not simple, but it is achievable. These are participant-driven groups that engage clinicians, patients and families, researchers, improvement experts, and others to establish and pursue aspirational aims. They succeed due to their constancy of purpose, shared commitment, transparency, and through use of data-driven improvement methods to create communities that go faster and further than any single group can go on its own.

IHI has been a leader for collaborative learning and improvement for many years. Starting with the Breakthrough Series Collaboratives in the 1990s, and 100,000(+) Lives Campaign in the 2000s, IHI has helped clinical teams and organizations improve in many domains. But these initiatives have been time-limited and their ability to sustain and spread has been challenged in most organizations.

The TST Origin Story

Over the past year, IHI has begun working with a small group of hospitals (~15) to conceive and begin testing the use of proven network learning strategies to improve patient and workforce safety. The Transforming Safety Together (TST) Network will be engaging more hospitals and clinical organizations in the coming months and expanding further in 2026–2027.

Our initial work has focused on establishing a framework that centers on concepts of human-centered design and incorporates newer principles of human factors engineering and safety science. This is in addition to our traditional areas of focus like strengthening governance, patient and family engagement, and organizational safety culture. We are beginning focused improvement work related to workplace violence, safe patient handling, sharps, and systemic gaps resulting in diagnostic error and delay. We are also working together to strengthen our learning and improvement from good catches submitted to incident reporting systems.

We’re honored to serve as co-chairs of TST, and we invite you to join us at the IHI Forum to learn more about this exciting and important network. Our “Couch Conversation” will take place December 8 at 4:30 PM PT.

Together we will make care (and caring) for patients safer than we dare to imagine. 

Daniel Hyman, MD, MMM, is a member of IHI’s Faculty and previously served as Chief Safety and Quality Officer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Children's Hospital Colorado.

Chalapathy Venkatesan, MD, CPPS, is a member of IHI’s Faculty and the Chief Quality and Safety Officer at Inova Health System.

Photo by freepik

You might also be interested in:

• View the full agenda for the 2025 IHI Forum
• Patient Safety improvement page