New "Good Catch" Program at Johns Hopkins Prevents Patient Harm

A recent article in Anesthesiology News reports this new and experimental program at Johns Hopkins that greatly improves patient protection:

"A new system that encourages every clinician to report situations that put patients at risk appears to be succeeding. Within 24 months, the new program, based at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in Baltimore, distributed 27 so-called “Good Catch Awards” (Table) to clinicians who reported situations that resulted in changes that were potentially lifesaving, including a national recall of improperly labeled drugs that had caused look-alike medication errors." Read the full article.

The program is already saving lives, and it has the potential to prevent a very large number of medical errors that are very costly to the “medical system.”

The first cost is for the medical services and items that are necessary to try to undo the harm, and some of the medical errors create a life-long need for expensive care. Preventing serious medical mistakes of course avoids the additional legal costs and the reimbursement to patients for their personal human losses.

It remains to be seen whether this can really change the “circle the wagons” mentality that sometimes prevents health care professionals from openly admitting errors and taking immediate measures to correct them.

One hopeful sign is that many harmful medical errors really are “systematic,” because often each individual is performing adequately his/her narrow specialty, and the harm results from a failure to safely coordinate the actions of the several health care professionals involved in critical aspects of patient care.