Is patient safety a high priority for executives?

One might think that the answer would be "no"-especially in light of a recent Health Grades study. That study found a 5% increase between 2002 and 2004 in "patient-safety incidents" among Medicare patients at US hospitals, as well as a 13% increase in infections from IV lines and catheters. The study's only good news was that deaths associated with these infections dropped very slightly from 4,219 to 4,206.

But a study conducted for the Health Management Academy, a for-profit provider of continuing medical education for executives of large health systems and academic medical centers, found that patient safety is indeed a high priority among the top brass of large systems. According to Modern Healthcare (4/10/06), patient safety was consistently ranked as the top priority over financial health among chief executive officers (46% vs. 38%, respectively), chief financial officers (50% vs. 41%), chief medical officers (86% vs. 8%) and chief nursing officers (74% vs. 22%). The study also found facilities increased spending on patient safety in 2005, and the number of executives who spent more than a quarter of their time on patient-safety issues increased by 17 percentage points from 2004 to 2005.