Activating Patients as Partners in Safety Learning Collaborative: Informational Session
Overview
The involvement of patients, families, and caregivers is essential in improving healthcare safety. Studies have shown that seeking feedback from patients and involving them in the solution-making process can increase patient awareness and health literacy, improving both patient satisfaction and health outcomes.
ECRI and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices PSO recently announced a new opportunity for healthcare providers to work collaboratively alongside both subject matter experts and peers in order to identify and implement strategies that enhance patient and family activation and engagement to improve healthcare safety. The collaborative will implement a learning systems approach to disseminate best practices across the healthcare community. Using tools such as ECRI's HI-IMPACT change action tool and the Total Systems Safety Organizational Self-Assessment, participants will gain insight into system factors that can be improved.
Learning objectives
During this informational webinar, speakers will discuss:
- Benefits of a collaborative approach to enhancing safety
- Methodology and tools employed to create measurable change
- Structure of the collaborative
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Speaker
Kimberly Cahill, MBA, BSN, RN
Operations Manager/Healthcare Safety Consultant, Infection Prevention and Control, and Consulting, ECRI
Ms. Cahill possesses over 37 years of registered nursing experience in various healthcare settings including, acute-care medical surgical and psychiatric nursing, acute and long-term care nursing administration, direct hospice care and community education, intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) medical education and consulting, healthcare quality improvement, and patient safety. She has worked on national healthcare quality improvement initiatives in cooperation with healthcare providers across all care settings to achieve goals established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as aligned with the National Healthcare Quality Strategy.
Prior to joining ECRI, Ms. Cahill worked as a Quality Specialist at Pennsylvania’s Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO), where she led CMS initiatives including healthcare patient and family engagement initiatives, the national readmission reduction and medications safety project, the opioid prescribing safety- special innovation project, and led the QIN-QIO team in writing a best practice intervention package for healthcare-associated infections. She was previously a Project Manager for the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s, Bureau of Epidemiology, during the recent Covid-19 epidemic. Additionally, as a former regional nurse at the South-Central Pennsylvania Healthcare Quality Unit, she served on several state task forces including medication safety and behavioral health. She is a former President of the Pennsylvania (PA) Developmental Disabilities Nurses Network (PADDNN) and received the National Recognition Award for PADDNN during her tenure.
Ms. Cahill has developed and delivered numerous educational programs to local, state, and national audiences focused on healthcare quality improvement, patient safety, patient and family engagement in healthcare, and healthcare conditions. Audiences for these programs ranged from consumers of healthcare services and healthcare providers to national healthcare quality leaders.
Ms. Cahill maintains an active registered nurse (RN) license in Pennsylvania. She remains a passionate advocate for the delivery of safe, equitable, high-quality healthcare, for all people, across the healthcare continuum. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from East Stroudsburg University and possesses a Master of Business Administration, with a concentration in healthcare leadership, from Western Governors University.