The Center’s safety advisement program offers direct service to MedStar Health and external organizations with services such as safety hazard analyses and event reviews.
By taking the following approach to safety, we develop recommendations and solutions to design a safer and more efficient healthcare environment.
Proactive safety analysis
Our team works to proactively identify safety hazards and reduce risk before harm occurs.
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Usability testing during procurement: Assess medical devices and other technology for potential use errors.
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Work environment analysis and optimization: Analyze work environments for unsafe work processes that may contribute to future patient harm and provide recommendations or redesign for safer and more efficient care.
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Safety and risk assessment: Apply rigorous analytic and visualization techniques to identify trends in safety data and support prioritization of improvement processes.
Reactive safety analysis
Our team conducts in-depth analysis of harm events after they occur to identify contributing factors and develop solutions to help prevent future occurrences.
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Event reviews: Analyze the role of the physical environment, technology, culture, and other system factors in relation to the harm event and provide recommendations for improvement.
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Usability analysis: Test products to determine how they may have contributed to a harm event and provide recommendations internally and to the product manufacturer.
Promoting safety culture
Our experts encourage a culture of safety through education and outreach.
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Just culture: Provide a foundation for a culture that supports open safety event reporting and risk mitigation, with a focus on system factors and not individual blame, through leadership engagement and workshops.
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High reliability organizations: Develop organizations that focus on consistent, reliable, and safe practices through organizational change methods.
Additional information
Center overview
Read the MedStar Human Factors Center Overview for the most recent summary of our work.
Featured projects
Explore our work in patient safety event data analysis and display to improve interventions.