Patient Safety

As the largest health care organization in Indiana, Clarian Health is dedicated to providing quality care and maintaining transparency. To that end, we created our award-winning quality Web site - www.clarian.org/quality - in early 2006. The site offers visitors access to Clarian's clinical measures on a variety of procedures and types of care. We believe that the Indiana State Department of Health's severe adverse event reporting will further enhance patient safety practices and quality of care at Clarian and at hospitals across the state.

"Clarian is devoted to patient safety and has many programs in place to enhance our quality of care," said Clarian President and CEO Daniel F. Evans, Jr. "Our goal is to be error-free, and we will continue to dedicate both financial and staff resources to achieve this goal."

As you will see by the data on this Web site, our teams at Clarian perform thousands of operations each year and see hundreds of thousands of patients. Unfortunately, in very rare cases, an adverse event does occur. Because our main concern is for the patient, the first thing we do in response to an unintended event is meet with the patient and family members to explain what happened and to discuss what could be done to reverse or alleviate any negative consequences. We believe that open and honest communication about these events is crucial in maintaining trust with our patients. We continue to be vigilant in the adverse event reporting process internally and in terms of our work to identify indicators, policies and procedures that can be improved to work toward the goal of zero errors.

Current efforts underway include:

• Computerized physician order entry
• Computerized medical stocking and distribution
• Re-education and training for nurses and clinical staff for the administration of high-alert drugs
• Continued compliance with Joint Commission National Patient Safety goals, which include: improving the accuracy of patient identification; improving the effectiveness of communication among caregivers; improving the safety of using medications; and encouraging the active involvement of patients and their families in patient care as a patient safety strategy