Pittsburgh can lead the charge to make health care safer by flowing in innovations in robotics, AI and other technology — and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative and the Pittsburgh Technology Council helped that effort by hearing from leaders in safety and autonomous technology from many fields.
That was the focus of the Safety Innovation Summit held Thursday, an effort to foster a cross-disciplinary collaboration in industries like energy, transportation, high-tech, manufacturing and health care that might not be talking to each other. But Karen Wolk Feinstein, PHRI and JHF's president and CEO, and Audrey Russo, president and CEO of the Tech Council, think it's high time that happened.
"I would like to see us as a safety capital of the world," Feinstein said. "We have the academic strategy, we have the entrepreneurial companies and leaders. The other thing that we have is the extraordinary range of safety management and safety science degree programs actually surrounding our city. We have the workforce.
Russo said Feinstein has long wanted to bring the regional areas of innovation and health care and other fields together to bring to bear the new technologies to increase patient safety and meet the goal of zero medical errors.
"Let's plant the flag," Russo said. "That's what today is. It's the beginning of that."
JHF, PHRI and Feinstein have long been national leaders in making health care safer for patients by focusing on best practices and standards that reduce medical errors. Feinstein and the late Paul O'Neill, the onetime CEO of Alcoa, literally wrote the book on health care and patient safety in the late 1990s.
Feinstein said the United States is going in the wrong direction in terms of health care safety and reducing medical errors that injure and kill patients every year.
"We are more unsafe now," Feinstein said.
Feinstein said AI and technology and ideas from other industries haven't been adopted by health care as much as it could to increase safety. Nor have the lessons of other high-risk industries, like aviation and mining, haven't been studied, she said.
"Pittsburgh has been a center for developing safety in industries," Feinstein said.
She asked: "Will health care join the club?"
The daylong summit included panels from autonomous transportation, energy, unions, manufacturing and health care about the state of the art of safety. Speakers included TeleTracking Co-CEO Christopher Johnson and representatives from MSA Safety, Consol Energy, CNX Resources Corp., Aurora and Wabtec, among others.
Jan Wachter, a professor and safety expert, said Pittsburgh and Allegheny County have long been leaders in industrial safety stretching back to a 1910 report by activist and journalist Crystal Eastman on industrial deaths in Allegheny County. Eastman's work led to a focus on worker safety, in Pittsburgh and New York and around the country, as well as the first safety and workers' compensation laws.
"I believe she is the mother of industrial safety," Wachter said.
The summit was sponsored by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative and the Pittsburgh Technology Council and held at Rodef Shalom on Fifth Avenue in Oakland.
