Our panel of experts discusses how healthcare organizations can move beyond reactive fixes to build systems, cultures, and technologies that prevent harm before it occurs.
Dheerendra Kommala, M.D.
Chief Medical Officer, ECRI
What best practices, tools, and innovations have you seen make the biggest impact on improving patient outcomes?
Despite decades of work aimed at improving patient safety, we still see high rates of preventable harm inflicted on patients in the United States each year. When it comes to tackling medical errors, we can never eradicate human fallibility from healthcare. However, we must design care delivery systems, shaped by human factors engineering, to drastically reduce the frequency and consequences of errors. The adage remains true: Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Healthcare organizations that achieve sustainable improvements in patient safety embrace a systems-based approach, a just culture for the workforce, and human factors engineering principles.
What technological application do you foresee making the greatest impact on improving patient outcomes?
Healthcare operates on a vast amount of data, but most organizations use the data reactively rather than proactively. For example, tracking medication errors or infection rates after harm has already occurred. While this is an important first step, that’s only scratching the surface of what the data can reveal. By shifting to predictive data analytics, healthcare teams can turn patterns into warning signs to spot risks earlier. This allows clinicians to intervene and prevent adverse events, side effects, and patient harm before they occur. Moving from reactive to proactive use of data can drastically reduce harm and improve efficiency.
Della M. Lin, M.D., M.S., FASA
Board Member and Secretary, Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation
What best practices, tools, and innovations have you seen make the biggest impact on improving patient outcomes?
Improving patient outcomes is often framed as implementing the newest “best practices.” Yet, healthcare is a complex clinical environment where teams continually adjust and improvise, particularly amid workforce turnover and relentless production pressure. These adaptations involve tradeoffs that are often invisible to colleagues or leadership. When organizations focus primarily on compliance with best practices, systems can become brittle, assuming care unfolds as designed while overlooking the tradeoffs clinicians make to keep patients safe. Leaders improve outcomes when they create space to pause, reflect, and debrief. As Confucius observed, wisdom requires both knowledge and reflection. Improvement begins when individuals, teams, and leaders deliberately ask, “What surprised us?” and “What tradeoffs did we make?”
What technological application do you foresee making the greatest impact on improving patient outcomes?
These days, we often caution that new technologies, especially AI, must “keep the human in the loop.” Important, but it doesn’t go far enough. In healthcare, we must keep the relationship in the loop. Patient outcomes are not just about alerts and data; they emerge from how well patients, clinicians, caregivers, and teams coordinate in uncertainty. Transformative technologies should amplify signal over noise and create space for relational coordination, trust, and shared sense-making. Used well, technology protects what matters most in care — the sacred flame at the center of the work we do: the relationship between those who give care and those who receive it.
