Improving Patient Safety through Transparency

U.S. health care organizations still have a ways to go to achieve a culture in which all errors are openly identified and investigated. The goal should be to reveal facts and facilitate discussion in order to prevent the repetition of similar mistakes. Transparency especially when things go wrong is increasingly considered necessary to improving the quality of health care. By being candid with both patients and clinicians, health care organizations can promote their leaders' accountability for safer systems, better engage clinicians in improvement efforts, and engender greater patient trust. Today, many institutions have initiated efforts to improve the sharing of information on publicly reported performance measures, but transparency regarding medical errors has proved much more difficult to achieve. U.S. health care organizations still have a ways to go to achieve a culture in which all errors are openly identified and ...