Patient Safety

• Patient Safety
• Medication Safety
• Safety Highlights
• Infection Control
• Adverse Event Reporting
• Minnesota Hospital Quality Report
• Minnesota Hospital Price Check

Adverse Health Event Reporting Law

Minnesota hospitals continue to lead the country in tackling medical errors and we hope other states will join us in similar efforts. HealthEast is proud that our four hospitals provide high quality, compassionate and safe care to thousands of patients each year.

HealthEast Care System supports the Minnesota Adverse Health Events (AHE) Reporting Law. This law requires hospitals to report whenever they have one of the 28 "never events." These 28 events are identified by the National Quality Forum as situations that should never happen in a hospital and include errors like wrong-site surgery, retention of a foreign object in a patient after surgery, and death or serious disability associated with medication error.

The Adverse Health Event reporting system focuses on learning what went wrong, not whom to blame. By simply punishing a caregiver, problems will not be fixed and another patient may be harmed by the same high-risk process. The new system replaces a punitive regulatory process with a quality improvement initiative, one that supports learning from the people at the front lines on how we can make our health care system safer. 

The Minnesota Department of Health works with the Minnesota Hospital Association to produce an annual public report of the Adverse Health Events. Visit www.health.state.mn.us/patientsafety to learn more.

Making care safer together

Minnesota's Adverse Health Event reporting system shines a spotlight on areas where hospitals can work together to make care safer.

HealthEast hospitals support the goal of this process:

• Encourage reporting of events
• Share learnings among Minnesota hospitals
• Focus on fixing problems

Even one error is one too many, and our focus is to reduce all errors.

• HealthEast hospitals have been actively involved with patient safety initiatives such as the Minnesota Alliance for Patient Safety (MAPS). We also meet all the JCAHO National Patient Safety Goals.
  
  
• HealthEast participated in the Minnesota Hospital Association's Pressure Ulcer Summit to further our efforts around preventing pressure ulcers.
  
  
• St. John's Hospital developed a Comprehensive Skin Care Program to decrease the development of Stage 3 or 4 pressure ulcers. This same Comprehensive Skin Care Program is now being implemented at all other HealthEast hospitals.
  
  
• HealthEast hospitals have also implemented process changes to improve patient safety:
  
  
  • Prohibited abbreviations
  • Safe site surgery
  • Time out before surgery and other invasive procedures
  • Medication reconciliation
  • Reducing patient falls