Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami: Bring Your Best Board

David Bates:
How would you feel if you're getting on an airplane and you look to the left and you saw that there were no instruments on the panel? Well, that really is what it's like when a doctor sits down with a blank piece of paper in a hospital and writes an order for a drug or a test. We need to computerize ordering and that can make things substantially safer.

Don Berwick:
Because of the courage and the deep commitment of Josie's mom Sorrel and her whole family, that story is now known and carried all over the world. And I have seen boards of trustees and tough senior executives and proud senior physicians change their minds. Turn, turn their hearts towards safety in a way they never had before just by hearing that story and then connecting to it and saying, "Oh my God. That could happen here too."

Bob Chapman:
When you create an environment where people can feel valued, trusted, safe, that they engage these experiences together and, and, and we see in them things that we never thought were possible. It allows us to see the beauty in every human being. Ordinary people that do extraordinary things.

Liam Donaldson:
If any of you were admitted to hospital tomorrow in any of the countries of the world in the western Europe, in North America and Australia, your chances of being subjected to an error in your care would be something like one in ten. Your chances of dying due to an error in healthcare would be one in 300. Compare that to air travel where your chances of dying these days in an air crash would be something like one in ten million.

Harvey Fineberg:
Technology is a tool. It will not solve our problems by itself. But, if we have the right leadership and vision in place... if we have identified the practices that need to be adopted and implemented, then technology can be crucial to making more progress more rapidly for more people.

Ashish Jha:
We've surveyed over 1,000 hospitals across the country. And when you look at the bottom performing, the worst performing hospitals in America, not a single board chair from any of those hospitals, not one, thought they were below average. Most thought they were better than average. A few thought they were about average. But not a single one thought they were below average. And it's a level of denial and a lack of knowledge about their own performance that I think is shocking.

John Nance:
The Boeing study and the CAST initiative that followed were so pivotal in so many different ways because what they were really was a gigantic slap in the face that good enough wasn't in fact gonna be good enough for very long. This study said if we expand as we think we're going to worldwide we're gonna have not just a couple of accidents we're gonna be dropping a couple of airplanes a week. We're not gonna have an aviation industry because nobody will trust it. That got everybody seriously focused on something that is absolutely pivotal for medicine and that is the belief, the real belief that we can get to zero.

John Noseworthy:
We have plenty of evidence to tell us that our hospitals and healthcare delivery is not safe enough. And what we're really looking for is leadership to make that happen.

Sandy Tolchin:
I'll never forget the first time I heard the Josie King story.I was choking back tears and I was absolutely speechless. It had an enormous impact not only on me, but on every clinical leader who was present in the room that day and there were over 200 of us. It was unbelievable. It galvanized everyone in the room to commit to eliminating preventable death and injury. That helped that whole strategy to evolve. It was a profound moment for me as well as all the other clinical leaders in Ascension Health.

Bob Chapman:
We've paid people for their hands for years. And they would've given us their heads and their hearts for free if we had just known how to ask them.