Becker's Hospital Review

30 CMO / CARE DELIVERY AHA taps WakeMed Health's former chief medical officer to serve in new executive role By Erica Carbajal T he American Hospital Association has selected Chris DeRienzo, MD, to serve as senior vice president and chief physician executive — a newly created role in which he will oversee the organization's physician leadership agenda. Dr. DeRienzo is the former chief medical officer and senior vice president of quality at Raleigh, N.C.- based WakeMed Health. Prior to that, he served as CMO of a healthcare predictive analytics company and as chief quality officer at Asheville, N.C.-based Mission Health. In his new role at the AHA, Dr. he will serve as a "key spokesperson on clinical issues," and develop strategies to improve health outcomes, according to a Dec. 21 statement. "Strengthening our relationships with physicians and other clinicians is more important than ever," Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the AHA, said in a news release. "Chris brings a deep practical knowledge of healthcare services, as well as a strong record leading efforts on care transformation and quality and continuous improvement to this vital work." n Viewpoint: Safety work relies too much on clinicians' heroism By Mackenzie Bean A national patient safety effort that standardizes best practices across all U.S. hospitals is required to achieve and sustain meaningful improvements in patient care, five patient safety experts said in a NEJM Catalyst article published Dec. 12. The pandemic erased years of progress in preventing healthcare- associated infections and other adverse clinical outcomes, though many experts were already sounding the alarm on a decline in national safety work before the pandemic hit. "The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that patient safety policy and practice has relied too heavily on the vigilance and heroism of clinicians, rather than the design of safe systems," the leaders wrote. They identified two key factors that contributed to a slip in patient safety performance: variable deployments of patient safety systems across healthcare organizations and high turnover rates among front-line clinicians fueled by burnout. To address these issues, the nation's patient safety organizations should unite with leading health systems to identify standardized best practices that could be adopted nationally, leaders wrote. Although this approach would not directly address staffing issues, it would "greatly reduce the learning burden that health professionals face when they move among care delivery settings," leaders said. n Adverse events occur in 24% of admissions, study suggests By Mackenzie Bean D espite decades of safety work, adverse events are still common in Massachusetts hospitals and may occur in about one-fourth of admissions, according to a study published Jan. 12 in e New England Journal of Medicine. To assess trends in adverse events, a team led by researchers at Boston- based Brigham and Women's Hospital analyzed a random sample of 2,809 acute care admissions from 11 Massachusetts hospitals in 2018. Four study findings: 1. Researchers identified at least one adverse event in 23.6 percent of admissions. 2. Of 978 adverse events identified, 22.7 percent were deemed preventable and 32.3 percent caused harm that resulted in substantial intervention or prolonged recovery. 3. Overall, preventable adverse events occurred in 6.8 percent of admissions. One death was also considered preventable. 4. e most common type of adverse events were: • Adverse drug events — 39 percent • Surgical or other procedural events — 30.4 percent • Nursing care events, including falls and pressure ulcers — 15 percent • Healthcare-associated infections — 11.9 percent e study included hospitals of different sizes but may not be representative of hospitals at large. In some cases, larger hospitals may have adverse event rates of 40 percent or higher, researchers said. "is finding suggests that if hospitals had data that were more reliable and more routinely collected, it is possible that monitoring could be improved, adverse event rates could be reduced, and improvement strategies could be shared through careful study of interventions," researchers said. n

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