How to Improve

Learn about the Model for Improvement, forming the improvement team, setting aims, establishing measures, and selecting and testing changes. Go to How to Improve.

High-Alert Medication Safety

High-alert (or high-hazard) medications are medications that are most likely to cause significant harm to the patient, even when used as intended. Although any medication used improperly can cause harm, high-alert medications cause harm more commonly and the harm they produce is likely to be more serious and leads to patient suffering and additional costs associated with care of these patients.

Known safe practices can reduce the potential for harm. The list of high-alert medications includes as many as 19 categories and 14 specific medications. Although it is important to improve management of all of these medications, some of them have been associated more frequently with harm, such as anticoagulants, narcotics and opiates, insulins, and sedatives. The most common types of harm associated with these medications include hypotension, bleeding, hypoglycemia, delirium, lethargy, and bradycardia.

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  • Effective Strategies for Hospitals Responding to the Opioid Crisis
    This document provides hospital and health system administrators and leaders with specific improvement ideas for five system-level strategies that address the challenges of preventing, identifying, and treating opioid use disorder.
  • Addressing the Opioid Crisis in the United States
    This IHI Innovation Report discusses key reasons why current efforts to reduce prescription opioid use and misuse in the US have thus far been largely ineffective in stemming the crisis; highlights gaps in current efforts that underscore the need for a coordinated and collaborative community-wide approach; identifies four primary drivers to reduce opioid use; and proposes a high-level construct for a system approach at the community level to address the US opioid crisis.
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