Early Discussion and Resolution 2022 Annual Report: Our Opportunity to Strengthen Oregon’s Patient Safety Infrastructure
In December 2022, we published a report on Oregon’s Early Discussion and Resolution (EDR) program: Early Discussion and Resolution: Our Opportunity to Strengthen Oregon’s Patient Safety Infrastructure on behalf of the Task Force on Resolution of Adverse Healthcare Incidents. In the report, the Task Force reflects on lessons learned from a pandemic that has shed light on the vulnerabilities and systemic inequities of our healthcare delivery system. A new approach is needed to strengthen how our healthcare system responds to and learns from harm events, and transparency is central to this effort.
With Oregon’s EDR process, we have an important tool to help advance transparency following harm events. However, EDR cannot do these things on its own. For EDR to realize its full potential in Oregon, organizations must have infrastructure in place to respond consistently and effectively to patient harm in a way that prioritizes patient safety, transparency, and learning.
Oregon’s Opportunity
Oregon has an opportunity to leverage EDR to help build statewide capacity to respond to and learn from medical harm events, both within individual healthcare organizations and across the healthcare continuum. In their report, the Task Force describes:
A transparent, proactive, and systems-based approach for responding to unanticipated harm events that promotes learning to help healthcare organizations improve patient safety.
The need for a collaborative, statewide approach to develop a strategy for change.
A starting point for this important and necessary work.