Venous Thromboembolism Safety Toolkit: A Systems Approach to Patient Safety

Excerpt

The current culture in health care is focused on patient safety and on delivering quality health care across the continuum of care. However, a culture of safety by itself cannot create change within an organization. Venous thromboembolism (VTE) requires coordination of care across multiple providers supported by a system that assists in the process of delivering and tracking outcomes of care. In this paper, we describe the implementation and use of safe practice interventions for patients who have been diagnosed with VTE or are at risk for VTE. In particular, we describe the use of the evidence-based, system-supported, interactive VTE Safety Toolkit—which includes diagnostic, preventive, and therapeutic algorithms—and the On-line Provider Training Module on VTE Prophylaxis, which is a mandatory Web-based VTE educational intervention for all providers. We describe how organizations and providers can use the VTE Safety Toolkit and On-line Provider Training Module on VTE Prophylaxis to identify business process that can be changed and create a mechanism to track provider and system performance and thereby improve patient safety and accountability around VTE.