How patient safety initiatives add value to your health plan

Aside from practicing as an OB/GYN, Dr. Charles Zonfa is the physician director of risk management and patient safety for Ohio Permanente Medical Group. In that position, he links three major programs: quality, patient safety and risk management.

“Because a lot of our patient safety initiatives are aimed at improving quality, it’s essential that once you identify areas where there are quality deficits or areas to be focused on for improvement, you have to have a way to address those gaps with patient safety initiatives,” Zonfa says.

“For example, there are a lot of governing bodies that say there are certain aspects of patient safety that should be the focus for each individual year. We try to incorporate those within our quality programs and develop initiatives or do process improvement around certain safety initiatives.”

Smart Business spoke with Zonfa about several new patient safety initiatives and why employers should care about them.

Why should employers shift their concentration to patient safety and a health plan’s quality programs?

When you are looking for a health care plan to assume the care of your work force, the first thing you want is a company that is dedicated to — or obsessed with — patient safety. If they aren’t, you face a higher risk of medical error and other problems. Then, your employees are not just going to be out of work for the procedure they had done, but for any complications or other unnecessary outcomes that could affect their ability to come back to work for weeks.

Health plans can impact the actual productivity employees have in the workplace by focusing on the quality they provide. There is a true dollar value attached to how long employees are out of work, which is related to the health plan’s ability to provide top-notch care.

One of the biggest concerns we hear from employer groups is if a part of their work force is out, their entire company’s productivity is impacted. That’s why it’s important to have a health plan that supplies high-quality care.

Say an employee goes in for an outpatient procedure and is only supposed to be out one to two days. If there is a complication because of a medical error, now the person is out for three to four weeks.

You can’t really argue with the fact that if the clinical staff had been better prepared for any situation, it would have lessened the chance of the employee missing four weeks of work.