Ambulatory Safety
AMA Initiatives in Ambulatory Patient Safety
In 2011, the AMA released a comprehensive 10-year review of research in ambulatory safety, and throughout 2012 AMA staff worked with experts nationwide to better define the role of ambulatory practices in ensuring safe transitions in care.
New report
Safe Care Transitions: What Role for Ambulatory Practices?
The AMA has been working closely with a panel of national experts in care transitions and patient safety to develop a set of roles and responsiblities for ambulatory practices in care transitions. A new report, released in February 2013, describes the expert panel's work and their agreement on a set of five recommended activities that ambulatory practices are best suited to accomplish in the process of creating safer care transitions. The report also describes five basic principles to guide the work of these practices in care transitions, and it provides sets of comprehensive checklists of tasks and goals to help organize this work. While few practices today have all the policy, financing, IT and other supports necessary to fully carry out these responsibilities, the expert panel is hopeful that their 5 X 5 framework of principles and responsibilities will stimulate further policy and practice innovations. Ambulatory practices have critical roles to play in ensuring safe care transitions – health care organizations and systems need to support these practices and ensure the work of care transitions, where-ever its origin, meets patients' health and social needs.
Research in Ambulatory Patient Safety 2000-2010: A 10-year Review
Most research on patient safety has examined hospital care, but each year 300 Americans are seen in ambulatory settings for every one person admitted to a hospital—and research shows that errors in ambulatory settings can be just as devastating as those in hospitals.
The AMA is pleased to provide a report that compiles and summarizes the research on patient safety in ambulatory care settings over the last decade.
The report offers a comprehensive look at some important, but under-appreciated aspects of patient safety, from office-based surgery to medication and diagnostic errors, to recent efforts to understand communication errors, and to the controversial study of patient responsibilities and family roles in ensuring safe care in the ambulatory setting.
Advancing Ambulatory Quality ImprovementThe AMA's report "Advancing ambulatory quality improvement: Results of focus groups with medical societies," provides highlights from an environmental scan of 13 medical societies to assess the current and future roles they have with quality improvement; how they can support the advancement of quality initiatives; and how the AMA can help them advance ambulatory quality improvement, in particular. The AMA worked with state and local medical societies participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) Aligning Forces for Quality initiative to explore the roles of medical societies in multi-stakeholder initiatives in ambulatory care quality improvement.
