Patient and Family Engagement Key to Improved Healthcare

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation launched a new national Patient Care Program today that seeks to eliminate all preventable harms to patients. The Foundation expects to allocate a half billion dollars over ten years if the Program develops as anticipated. The Patient Care Program will focus on both meaningfully engaging patients and their families in their own healthcare and developing a systems approach that optimally reconfigures interprofessional teams, processes, and technology to be supportive of that engagement. Such work should also decrease healthcare costs.

The new program will build on the achievements and current work by others in the field, collaborate with like-minded organizations, and fund research and clinical projects that will develop and fully integrate these two critical areas.

Dr. George Bo-Linn, chief program officer for the Patient Care Program, said the effort address the loss of dignity and respect that some patients and families experience are preventable harms that must be addressed as well, he added.

Each year tens of thousands of preventable deaths occur in U.S. hospitals, and millions of dollars are spent on complications and patient readmissions that could be averted. Additionally, fewer than half of all patients report feeling part of and respected by the healthcare system that serves them. 

Today's launch included the announcement of a strategic partnership with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, where an interdisciplinary team of healthcare professionals, engineers, bioethicists, and others will identify ways to eliminate all harm to patients, engage families in the care of their loved ones, and reduce costs beginning in the intensive care unit. The $8.9 million grant from the Foundation will support their work. The project, led by Institute Director Dr. Peter Pronovost, will focus on identifying improvements that could be applied in other healthcare settings.

The Foundation's new Program is also working with the Institute of Medicine, RAND Corporation, Health Affairs, University of California, San Francisco, Stanford University, and others.

The Patient Care Program includes and builds on the achievements of Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis.

SOURCE Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation