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Children's National Received 2016 Patient Safety Award from District of Columbia Hospital Association

Honored for innovative technology that improves patient care experience and health outcomes

Washington, DC – Children’s National Health System has been named the winner of the District of Columbia Hospital Association (DCHA) 2016 Patient Safety Award in recognition of improved patient outcomes in the hospital’s Cardiac Intensive Care service. The award, presented last night at the association’s annual banquet, recognizes an individual or team that has demonstrated exceptional commitment to improving the safety of patients, furthering the quality of care, and reducing errors in medicine.

Brian Jacobs, MD, Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer, his team  at the Bear Institute for Health Innovation, and the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Children’s National, partnered  to develop and execute a new program using digital displays to improve patient health outcomes and experience. These large-scale digital monitors, called Quality and Safety Boards, are prominently displayed throughout the unit, listing quality measures and preventative actions for hospital acquired conditions including ventilator-acquired pneumonia, unplanned tracheal extubation, and catheter-associated blood stream infections. The boards allow a patient’s care team to talk with family members about what the safety and quality terms and measures means, explain the preventative actions the teams takes, and how families can help, ask questions, and raise issues or concerns.

“These Quality and Safety Boards help ensure that our patients get the very best care and assist our front line clinical teams in making better and faster decisions, ” said Kathy Gorman, MSN, RN, FAAN, Executive Vice President of Patient Care Services and Chief Operating Officer. “I want to congratulate Brian Jacobs, the Bear Institute, and the CICU care teams for joining together to continue to improve our efforts to keep our patients safe. Their dedication and hard work led to the design of this tool to assist the entire care team as they work to improve patient care experience and outcomes.”

In the Cardiac ICU, and where the boards have been deployed on the inpatient units, they have helped improve outcomes in a number of hospital acquired conditions for the youngest patients, where the margin for error is much smaller. The DCHA Annual Banquet recognizes the excellent work of medical institutions in the District of Columbia during the past year. For a complete listing of 2016 award recipients, visit the DCHA website.

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