Patient Safety Learning Laboratory: Making Acute Care More Patient-Centered

The Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (PSLL) focuses on developing health information technology (HIT) tools to engage patients, family, and professional care team members in reliable identification, assessment, and reduction of patient safety threats in real-time, before they manifest in actual harm.

The Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (PSLL) will develop systems approaches to integrating health information technology (HIT), stakeholder engagement mechanisms, and process design/engineering methods focused on patient safety, development and enhancement of tools, health care system interventions, and translation into practice. The three technological toolkits to be developed as part of the Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (PSLL) are:1) Patient-centered Fall Prevention Toolkit which aims to engage patients and their family caregivers in the design of HIT tools to prevent patient falls and related injuries during an acute hospitalization; 2) Patient Safety Checklist Tool to improve patient safety and quality outcomes, provider efficiency, and team communication; and 3) MySafeCare Patient Safety Reporting System which aims to iteratively develop and evaluate the impact of a patient safety reporting system on patient safety and fosters a health system focused on collaborative learning. The Brigham and Women's Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (BWH PSLL) will establish a vibrant learning ecosystem of health services, informatics, and systems engineering researchers, collaborating with patients and family for evolving and applying these approaches to adverse event prevention in hospitalized patients. In addition, a Systems Engineering, Usability, and Integration (SEUI) Core will leverage health systems engineering approaches to develop and provide a system-wide methodology to aid in the successful implementation and improvement of Health Information Technology (HIT) tools and a model known as the Patient SatisfActive® will be developed, tested, and refined to create a culture of patient- and family-centered care.