Bringing joy and meaning back to the workplace through patient safety strategies and connected healthcare operations

As health care continues to embrace and excel in technological and digital advancements, preventable harm, cognitive and administrative burden, and workplace violence continue to contribute to emotional exhaustion, burnout and loss of joy in our workforce. This has had profound negative impacts on our outcomes and is a barrier to providing the safest care. One solution-based framework that can address and recentre our efforts around safer, more inclusive and transparent health care is the recently introduced Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Patient Safety Structural Measures (PSSM). These measures consist of the following domains: leadership commitment to eliminating preventable harm, strategic planning and organisational policy, culture of safety and learning system, accountability and transparency, and patient and family engagement. These measures will require us to refocus using available digital solutions to pull from disparate data sources to better enable our leaders and teams to understand the drivers of the context in which we work, identify disparities in healthcare delivery and outcomes, integrate a ‘just culture’, consistently use cause analysis tools and understand the themes and trends produced by these methods, be transparent and rapid in our response to harm with our teams and patients and families, and include our patients and families in the design and re-design of our systems to produce the safest care. The PSSM provide guidance, coupled with an understanding of the principles of human performance and connected data and information, and can restore joy and purpose and create long-lasting sustainable change and improvement in our health outcomes and our organisations. Software solutions offer the promise of implementing this work in ways that reduce the administrative burden and provide valuable actionable insights. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.