Hospitals, clinics, health care associations, and hospital systems are continually exploring new ways to strengthen patient safety. Ariadne Labs and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Executive and Continuing Professional Education are collaborating to offer a new custom course, Creating High Impact Tools to Improve Clinical Effectiveness, to enable organizations to create and use checklists for better quality and safety.
Checklists and similar strategies give clinicians a tool that reliably minimizes errors and improves the quality of health care delivery. However, if checklists are poorly designed or only partially implemented, they become ineffective and inadequate, and most importantly, only provide the illusion of improving quality and safety. Ariadne’s program will help clinical and organizational leaders understand when a checklist is the appropriate tool for a given problem, what the checklist should contain, and most importantly, how it should be structured, implemented, and supported.
This three-day program consists of lectures, panel discussions, and practical, experiential exercises. Participants will have the opportunity to work on safety checklists for their own organization, explore strategies and roadblocks for effective implementation, and brainstorm how their checklists could improve. Presentations, discussions, and group assignments will be custom tailored for your organization.
We encourage organizations to consider a team-based approach for maximum effectiveness, including Chief Medical Officers, Nurse Quality Officers, and Hospital Quality Officers across every specialty.
Course leaders include:
- Dr. William Berry, Ariadne Labs’ Chief Implementation Officer, formerly Chief Medical Officer. Bill is also a Surgical Consultant to the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions and serves as the Boston Program Director of the “Safe Surgery Saves Lives” initiative with the World Health Organization’s Patient Safety Program. Prior to these roles, Bill spent seventeen years in practice as a cardiac surgeon.
- Dr. Alexander Hannenberg is a faculty member in the Safe Surgery Program at Ariadne Labs. His work has focused on the implementation of Crisis Checklists for critical event management in the operating room and beyond. He is also a founding Board Member of Lifebox USA. He is Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists and now serves as its Chief Quality Officer.
- Dr. Atul Gawande is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs. He is also a surgeon, professor, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Samuel O. Their Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Atul is also Chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that focuses on reducing surgical deaths globally.
- Dr. Alex Haynes is Director for the Safe Surgery Program at Ariadne Labs and Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on improving surgical care delivery through improved measurement and implementation of quality improvement initiatives. In collaboration with colleagues from the Harvard Business School, he is running a study to investigate the links between hospital management practices and ability to implement large-scale quality improvement projects, funded with a research grant from the Rx Foundation. He is also a practicing surgical oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
If you are interested in commissioning this program for your organization, please contact Rebecca Moore at 617.432.2207 or rmoore@hsph.harvard.edu.