With the United Hospital Fund’s support, GNYHA launched the High Reliability Organization (HRO) Leadership Forum for hospitals in January. The last session for this inaugural group of nine hospitals was held last week. At the session, hospital teams shared examples of HRO habits/interventions implemented by their organizations since the program began that can lead to greater reliability. These efforts included sharing a staff-wide dashboard and real-time metrics at daily patient safety huddles, defining “harm” across the organization to support a shared mental model for achieving improvement goals, and using executive rounding to heighten staff engagement and support for improvement efforts. Teams also shared challenges and crowd-sourced suggestions for effectively engaging middle managers as champions for improvement, and to develop a culture of trust and transparency that further promotes patient safety efforts.
HRO Leadership Forum faculty member Erin Dupree, MD, led a discussion on strategies to increase alignment and commitment to HRO through performance improvement (PI) initiatives. The group referred to baseline assessment data on their PI practices, which were submitted at the program’s onset, and engaged in group work to plan the next steps of their respective HRO journeys. In a post-program evaluation, participants rated the program highly, expressed satisfaction with the HRO curriculum, and shared recommendations for how GNYHA should continue to support hospitals’ efforts to achieve high reliability.