March 2nd through the 8th were National Patient Safety Awareness Week – I don’t really know what that means either. We seem to have a lot of these kinds of days and weeks – my daughters pointed out that March 4 was National Pancake Day – with resultant implications for our family meals.
But back to patient safety and National Patient Safety Awareness Week. In recognition, I thought it would be useful to talk about one organization that is doing so much to raise our awareness of the issues of patient safety. Which organization is this? Who seems to be leading the charge, reminding us of the urgent, unfinished agenda around patient safety?
It’s an unlikely one: The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. Yes, the OIG. This oversight agency strikes fear into the hearts of bureaucrats: OIG usually goes after improper behavior of federal employees, investigates fraud, and makes sure your tax dollars are being used for the purposes Congress intended.
In 2006, Congress asked the OIG to examine how often “never events” occur and whether the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adequately denies payments for them. The OIG took this Congressional request to heart and has, at least in my mind, used it for far greater good: to begin to look at issues of patient safety far more broadly.
Taken from one lens, the OIG’s approach makes sense: the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on healthcare for older and disabled Americans and Congress obviously never intended those dollars pay for harmful care. So, the OIG thinks patient safety is part of its role in oversight, and thank goodness it does.
Because in a world where patient safety gets a lot of discussion but much less action, the OIG keeps the issue on the front burner, reminding us of the human toll of inaction.
