Leapfrog Group
John D. Birkmeyer, MD, surgery and community and family medicine, helped launch the Leapfrog Group hospital safety initiative in November 2000, based on his research for better outcomes. The program, sponsored by the Business Roundtable, strives to improve the quality of health care and reduce medical errors by using its purchasing power to leverage patient safety.
The group was unveiled in conjunction with Birkmeyer's research indicating that three measures could save up to 58,300 lives and prevent up to 522,000 medication errors each year. Consortium members will steer employees to hospitals that have the following: Computerized prescription systems, critical care specialists in ICUs and high volume performance of specialized procedures. If implemented by all non-rural hospitals in the United States, these three standards will improve safety and save lives, Birkmeyer found.
- Computer Physician Order Entry: Systems where physicians enter medication orders via computer linked to prescribing error-prevention software have been shown to reduce serious prescribing errors in hospitals by more than 50%.
- Evidence-Based Hospital Referral: Research indicates that a patient's risk of dying could be reduced by more than 30% by referring patients needing certain complex medical procedures to hospitals offering the best survival odds based on scientifically valid criteria Ð such as the number of times a hospital performs these procedures each year.
- ICU Physician Staffing: Intensive care units (ICU) staffed by physicians trained in critical care medicine have been shown to reduce the risk of patients dying in the ICU by more than 10%.