A $500,000 grant from the Jewish Healthcare Foundation to the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative will help seed the growing effort to build a patient safety and technology hub here in Pittsburgh.
The hub was envisioned by JHF's Karen Wolk Feinstein, who has for decades been a leader in patient safety and quality initiatives that raised the issue of preventable medical errors and then helped institute policies and procedures that saved lives.
Feinstein earlier this year has been one of the driving forces over the potential creation of a National Transportation Safety Board-style independent agency that would focus on patient safety and medical errors on a nationwide level. Avoidable medical errors continue to kill at least 250,000 patients a year in the United States, according to data.
JHF's two-year $500,000 grant will between January 2022 and June 2024 help shore up efforts in the Pittsburgh region to use autonomous technology and the city's global leadership in it to tackle patient safety issues as well as its status as a medical and research powerhouse.
"We envision Pittsburgh as a global leader in autonomous patient safety, building on our edge in eds, meds and technology," Feinstein said. "This is long overdue. Healthcare safety technology is at the cottage stage. We're aiming now for a moonshot, and it should come from Pittsburgh."
In an interview with the Business Times, Feinstein said Pittsburgh was especially positioned to be a global leader in this effort.
"We have a lot (of resources) here," she said.
The initiative is working to bring together technology, medical and educational partners and is creating what it calls an autonomous patients safety blueprint that will help catalog what the Pittsburgh region has, work to fund ideas and "the development of a prototype to adapt hospital and health-system command centers to anticipate and prevent medical errors."
The work is supported by Pittsburgh Technology Council President and CEO Audrey Russo and Dr. Ronald Poropatich, who is director of the Center for Military Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
"The time is right for this investment to move Pittsburgh's growing resources and talent in autonomous technology to transform patient safety," Poropatich said in a statement.
