Quality and Safety Initiatives

As a partner organization in the IHI Leadership Alliance, Henry Ford is involved with national improvement efforts in quality and safety, most recently including work on quality metrics, electronic health records and population health.

MHA sponsors multiple collaborative quality initiatives across the state -- in which Henry Ford participates or leads -- including initiatives around reducing blood stream infections from catheters, urine infections from Foley catheters, opioid use reduction, and sepsis early identification and treatment. MHA also sponsors Henry Ford’s Patient Safety Organization (PSO) for reporting errors, as well as Henry Ford’s participation in the CMS Hospital Engagement Network (HEN 2.0).

BCBSM sponsors multiple continuous quality initiatives in which Henry Ford is an active participant or leader. These include projects to improve care in cardiovascular services, bariatric surgery, breast surgery, radiation oncology, spine surgery, emergency medicine and more.

In partnership with the nationally recognized consulting group Healthcare Performance Improvement (HPI), Henry Ford has embarked on a commitment to having zero safety events and becoming highly reliable as an industry, much as other manufacturing industries have done in the past. This HRO journey builds upon our Baldrige framework and will continue to advance our safety efforts. As part of the HRO journey, all departments within Henry Ford have implemented daily safety huddles to increase awareness of safety issues.

Henry Ford participates and leads numerous readmission reduction programs, including a tri-country collaborative which works with many skilled nursing facilities (SNF) in the area to improve SNF quality and prevent readmissions. We have seen a significant reduction in readmissions over the past five years.

The safety of employees is critical to any quality and safety program, and our human resources team has implemented various employee safety programs. We developed a novel approach to the reduction of employee violence in behavioral health through the use of a de-escalation Rapid Response team, which has led to a more than 30 percent reduction in employee violence events.

Henry Ford leverages the power of Epic EMR to advance quality and safety, including standardization of workflows, order sets and clinical decision support. Henry Ford is improving quality by embedding support for Choosing Wisely initiatives, which are aimed at reducing unnecessary testing. Henry Ford has also developed many novel approaches to improved quality and safety, including problem oriented charting and immediate release of lab results to patients. MyChart (patient portal to receive electronic health information) has more 300,000 users.

Leveraging Epic EMR, Henry Ford has developed an electronic data warehouse and is providing analytic support to many areas, including Quality, Safety and Population Health. Henry Ford is also developing "real-time" decision support and analytic tools, as well as a new physician attribution methodology in order to support transparent and timely quality and safety performance.

Safe, high quality healthcare is often achieved by partnering with a variety of other healthcare organizations, patients and their families, and the community on important healthcare issues. At Henry Ford, we encourage these partnerships in order to continue to grow and excel in healthcare.