The need: Lifespan (now Brown University Health) is an integrated academic health system in Rhode Island with more than 15,000 employees. As part of their journey to become a High Reliability Organization, they sought to promote a culture of quality and safety across the organization. 

To achieve this required educating nurses, physicians and other frontline staff on the significance of safety in healthcare, quality processes and how their work intersects with quality and safety. Lifespan knew that with an informed staff leveraging a common skillset and vocabulary, they could evolve from a reporting mindset to a culture of improvement. But they needed a program and a process to implement. 

The solution: Lifespan partnered with NAHQ to deploy a standardized solution through NAHQ’s HQ Concepts in Healthcare Quality & Safety for Frontline Staff. This standardized, one-hour online course provides non-quality staff with a basic understanding of quality work including the principles of quality improvement, processes and methods, data-driven decision making, and how to integrate quality across a multi-disciplinary team. 

To make the program turnkey to implement, it was added to the Lifespan educational platform as required annual training. To date, Lifespan has trained more than 10,000 employees through HQ Concepts.  

The results: To assess the success of the program, Lifespan executed an extensive Safety Culture Survey across its network in partnership with Press Gainey. The survey results showed a positive cultural shift with an 87% increased participation in the survey and improvement in every survey domain including Prevention & Reporting, Resources & Teamwork, and Pride & Reputation.  

Additionally, several significant financial benefits were attributed to the program. Elevating and standardizing organizational knowledge of quality and safety resulted in an average 3 point reduction in PSI 90 composite scores and a reduction of $3 million in HAC penalties plus millions more in cost avoidance from reduced harm.