The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation launched a new national Patient Care Program today that seeks to eliminate all preventable harms to patients. The Foundation expects to allocate a half billion dollars over ten years if the Program develops as anticipated. The Patient Care Program will focus on both meaningfully engaging patients and their families in their own healthcare and developing a systems approach that optimally reconfigures interprofessional teams, processes, and technology to be supportive of that engagement. Such work should also decrease healthcare costs.
The new program will build on the achievements and current work by others in the field, collaborate with like-minded organizations, and fund research and clinical projects that will develop and fully integrate these two critical areas.
Dr. George Bo-Linn, chief program officer for the Patient Care Program, said the effort address the loss of dignity and respect that some patients and families experience are preventable harms that must be addressed as well, he added.
Each year tens of thousands of preventable deaths occur in U.S. hospitals, and millions of dollars are spent on complications and patient readmissions that could be averted. Additionally, fewer than half of all patients report feeling part of and respected by the healthcare system that serves them.
