White House Meeting Highlights Patient Safety Progress, Next Steps

In recognition of World Patient Safety Day on Sept. 17, the White House convened health organization leaders, patient and workforce advocates, and healthcare system executives to discuss how to achieve more progress on patient safety initiatives.

The meeting highlighted several steps federal agencies are taking: 

• The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) launched the National Action Alliance for Patient and Workforce Safety (NAA). The alliance is a collective effort of federal agencies, including those in HHS, Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), as well as a growing number of private partners. On Nov. 1, NAA will deliver the first version of a National Healthcare Safety Dashboard to transparently monitor the nation’s progress toward eliminating the highest priority preventable patient and workforce harms across all settings, beginning with hospitals.


• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is releasing new guidance that will help hospitals nationwide establish programs to ensure that the right tests are completed for the right patient and that results are communicated promptly. Additionally, working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the CDC will develop new measures to advance recognition and treatment of sepsis, a life-threatening condition that takes the lives of more than 300,000 Americans each year.


• CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health renewed their commitment to provide nationally-accredited training in preventing workplace violence to healthcare providers and academic degree programs.

• CMS has committed to the goal of reducing patient harm and promoting a culture of safety for patients nationwide. To increase transparency and accountability, CMS will incorporate a patient safety element, such as the patient safety structural measure or a policy component into its public reporting and quality programs and evaluate available authorities to prevent, where appropriate, paying for services that result in harm. For example, CMS recently finalized the adoption of the Patient Safety Structural Measure in to the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program beginning with the CY2025 reporting period. Additionally, CMS will address health care disparities and empower patients’ voices in safety by developing, by 2026, a patient-reported safety measure to ensure the voice of the patient is always included. 


• DoD said it would establish a lead to coordinate patient safety across the Military Health System enterprise. Additionally, DoD will modernize its patient safety reporting system in order to standardize workflows and conduct advanced analytics.  These actions will reduce variation in how care is provided and allow for robust health care disparity analysis.


• The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) will fund the Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention – Workforce Expansion Program to address the critical nurse shortage in rural and underserved areas, specifically in acute and long-term care settings. In September, HRSA will make five awards, for a total of $4.875 million. 


• The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) health system leaders will sign a Safety Culture Commitment  by the middle of 2025; VHA will establish a new national program in 2025 for the prevention and management of patient falls across care settings; and VHA will modernize its data systems in 2025 in conjunction with the Defense Health Agency, by specifically making the data interoperable, to identify and reduce harms across the military and veteran health systems. 

In addition, national and regional organizations have made the following commitments:

• Patients for Patient Safety US commits to leading Project PIVOT, an initiative that will convene a diverse group of stakeholders to identify and prioritize validated patient-reported experience and patient-reported outcomes questions that address patient safety and racial or ethnic bias for further development and use in patient survey programs.

• Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, in partnership with the Ambulatory Surgery Center Quality Collaboration, will share a new quality measurement tool with more than 6,300 Medicare-certified surgery centers in the United States to assess a center against the expected standard of safe, high-quality care.

• The Association of American Medical Colleges commits to releasing a revised set of educational competencies that focus on patient safety and quality improvement, helping to ensure that physicians have the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities to provide safe care everywhere and zero preventable harm for all.

• Press Ganey commits to building a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled integrated analytics dashboard in 2025 to bring together crucial data on patient and workforce safety, safety culture, safety incident reporting, and patient perceptions of safety, in addition to continued AI analyses of Press Ganey Patient Safety Organization data. These comprehensive tools will equip leaders with clear, prioritized, and actionable insights, including potential contributions of inequities.

• A&M Rural Community Health Institute Patient Safety Organization, a component PSO of Texas A&M Health Science Center, commits to launching a “Just Culture” collaborative in rural health systems, a year-long initiative to build a learning community of rural providers with a goal to prevent harm and reduce disparities for the 4.2 million Texans who live and work in rural areas.

• The Jewish Healthcare Foundation and Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative commit to supporting advances in patient safety through the Patient Safety Technology Challenge. The technology challenge seeks to inspire and engage the next generation of innovators and researchers, encouraging the use of technology to solve problems in patient safety. Entrants for the Patient Safety Technology Award are competing for a new prize pool of $25,000 through the Grand Challenge and finalists of the Grand Challenge will be featured on stage at CES 2025.

In addition, 16 large healthcare systems committed to actions that support providing safe care and zero preventable harm for all.