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Quality and Safety Initiatives

Continuously working to deliver the best and safest care

For more than 100 years, Henry Ford has been a leader in promoting and securing safe and quality care to all of the patients and communities we serve. Our growing commitment as stewards of improving health is expressed in our multiple partnerships and efforts, all of which are intended to keep patients safe from harm, increase life longevity and improve overall health.

  • Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Leadership Alliance

    As a partner organization in the IHI Leadership Alliance, Henry Ford is involved with national improvement efforts in quality and safety, most recently including work on quality metrics, electronic health records and population health.

  • Michigan Hospital Association (MHA) Keystone Center

    MHA sponsors multiple collaborative quality initiatives across the state -- in which Henry Ford participates or leads -- including initiatives around reducing blood stream infections from catheters, urine infections from Foley catheters, opioid use reduction, and sepsis early identification and treatment. MHA also sponsors Henry Ford’s Patient Safety Organization (PSO) for reporting errors, as well as Henry Ford’s participation in the CMS Hospital Engagement Network (HEN 2.0).

  • Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) collaboratives

    BCBSM sponsors multiple continuous quality initiatives in which Henry Ford is an active participant or leader. These include projects to improve care in cardiovascular services, bariatric surgery, breast surgery, radiation oncology, spine surgery, emergency medicine and more.

  • High Reliability Organization (HRO) journey

    In partnership with the nationally recognized consulting group Healthcare Performance Improvement (HPI), Henry Ford has embarked on a commitment to having zero safety events and becoming highly reliable as an industry, much as other manufacturing industries have done in the past. This HRO journey builds upon our Baldrige framework and will continue to advance our safety efforts. As part of the HRO journey, all departments within Henry Ford have implemented daily safety huddles to increase awareness of safety issues.

  • Readmissions Reduction

    Henry Ford participates and leads numerous readmission reduction programs, including a tri-country collaborative which works with many skilled nursing facilities (SNF) in the area to improve SNF quality and prevent readmissions. We have seen a significant reduction in readmissions over the past five years.

  • Employee safety

    The safety of employees is critical to any quality and safety program, and our human resources team has implemented various employee safety programs. We developed a novel approach to the reduction of employee violence in behavioral health through the use of a de-escalation Rapid Response team, which has led to a more than 30 percent reduction in employee violence events.

  • Epic Electronic Medical Record (EMR)

    Henry Ford leverages the power of Epic EMR to advance quality and safety, including standardization of workflows, order sets and clinical decision support. Henry Ford is improving quality by embedding support for Choosing Wisely initiatives, which are aimed at reducing unnecessary testing. Henry Ford has also developed many novel approaches to improved quality and safety, including problem oriented charting and immediate release of lab results to patients. MyChart (patient portal to receive electronic health information) has more 300,000 users.

  • Advanced analytics

    Leveraging Epic EMR, Henry Ford has developed an electronic data warehouse and is providing analytic support to many areas, including Quality, Safety and Population Health. Henry Ford is also developing "real-time" decision support and analytic tools, as well as a new physician attribution methodology in order to support transparent and timely quality and safety performance.

  • Collaborative partnerships

    Safe, high quality health care is often achieved by partnering with a variety of other health care organizations, patients and their families, and the community on important health care issues. At Henry Ford, we encourage these partnerships in order to continue to grow and excel in health care.