Quality and patient safety

Patient safety is an essential part of Kaiser Permanente's mission to deliver high quality health care. We believe it is every patient's right and every employee and practitioner's responsibility.

Kaiser Permanente promotes safe care by:

• Developing a unified and strong patient safety culture, in which patient safety and error reduction are considered everyone's responsibility.
• Creating an environment that encourages responsible reporting of errors, near misses, and opportunities for system improvements without retaliation against those making such reports.
• Providing routine patient safety and error prevention training and education for all staff.
• Maintaining meaningful monitoring and reporting of safety indicators and outcomes, which guide continuous improvement.
• Encouraging patients and families to be active, involved and informed members of the health care team.

Back to: Our commitment to quality

Clinical quality and patient safety is an ongoing process of setting and meeting ever-more-rigorous goals. Quality and safety thrive in a transparent and blame-free environment in which health care systems, their staff, and patients freely acknowledge and discuss areas of improvement.

That's why Kaiser Permanente has long supported — in many cases helped develop — and participated in initiatives such as:

• The Hospital Quality Initiative, an industry-developed federal program that provides hospital-quality data to the public via Medicare's Hospital Compare website. Kaiser Permanente measures and monitors the quality of care provided by its contracted hospitals through the Leapfrog Group and Hospital Compare websites.
• Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 100K Lives Campaign, to save 100,000 lives a year by using evidence-based medicine. Kaiser Permanente was a leader in getting every Washington hospital to agree to participate.
• The Leapfrog Group, which focuses on several hospital care standards to improve patient safety.