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Patient Safety

Updated 5/10/10

Why Employers Care: View the Video*

Health care quality and patient safety remain at unacceptably low levels. Preventable adverse events (AE) contribute to rising health care costs and often result in extended hospital stays, as well as lost productivity.1 Improving health care quality and safety can be a source of cost savings for employers.

  • Every day, more than 250 Americans die because of preventable medical errors in hospitals.2
  • Preventable events such as hospital-acquired infections can increase a patient's length of stay in the hospital significantly. The excess length of stay can vary from 9 days for ventilator-associated pneumonia to 26 days for mediastinitis after coronary artery bypass grafting.3
  • Thomson Reuters suggests the national cost for 20 adverse events in their inpatient database is approximately $5.4 billion.4

What Employers Can Do

Join the Employer Trustee Network
As purchasers of care and business leaders with expertise in quality improvement in their own companies, employers have much to contribute. Hospital and health system boards are the most important agents of change — and employers play a critical role in driving this change. Working with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and other organizations, the Business Group is helping member company executives be more effective in their hospital Board roles. We invite any Business Group member to send us the names of its executives serving on hospital boards — by joining our network these volunteer Board members from your company will have free access to information and support to help them more effectively represent the employer perspective and influence the hospital to achieve safer care.

In addition employers should:
  • Communicate to plans and providers the urgent need for a safe, patient-centric care system;
  • Insist on transparency to identify highest quality and safest hospitals, then the most efficient;
  • Educate employees on highest quality, safest providers and facilities;
  • Use contracting requirements and "preferred" and "Center of Excellence" status to promote patient safety measures and policies; and
  • Urge hospitals to refrain from billing and hold patients harmless for "never events" and other costs incurred due to medical errors (as CMS has).

The Business Group has compiled several tools and resources to help employers, including:

A Toolkit for Action: Ensuring Patient Safety Across Health Care

Helping Employees Choose the Right Hospital: A Toolkit to Facilitate Effective Communication

State Report Cards on Hospital Quality and Safety

Solutions Online — Patient safety

National Business Group on Health's Position Statement on Quality and Safety

For more information on our work in patient safety, please contact patientsafety@businessgrouphealth.org.



All Business Group Patient Safety Resources/Publications

This link will take you to a chronological list of Business Group resources that are related to this topic. For additional search options please visit Publications. Most resources are available only to members of the National Business Group on Health and are designated with .




Other Patient Safety Resources



1 Leape L. Reporting of Adverse Events. NEJM. 2002;347(20):1633-1638.

2 To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Institute of Medicine, November 1999.

3 Perencevich E, Stone P, Wright S, et a. Raising Standards While Watching the Bottom Line: Making a Business Case for Infection Control. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. 2007;28(10):1121-1133.

4 Kelley, R. Where Can $700 Billion in Waste be Cut Annually from the U.S. Healthcare System? Thomsom Rheuters. October 2009.

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