Question of the Month
Each month, The Peminic-Greeley PSO selects a Question of the Month that is designed to highlight best practices, help organizations deal with common challenges, and encourage professional development. We will also address any news related to PSOs that might cause confusion about collecting data.
2008
December
What does a PSO have to do?
A PSO is required to do eight things. These are paraphrased below:
- Make efforts to improve patient safety and the quality of health care delivery
- Collect and analyze Patient Safety Work Products (PSWP) submitted by the members
- Develop and disseminate information back to the members to improve patient safety such as recommendations, protocols, or information regarding best practices
- Use the PSWP to encourage a culture of safety and to provide feedback and assistance to minimize patient risk for the members
- Maintain internal procedures to preserve the confidentiality of PSWP submitted by the members
- Provide appropriate security measures for PSWP
- Utilize qualified staff
- Other activities related to the operation of a patient safety evaluation system and the provision of feedback to its members
Our goal at the Peminic-Greeley PSO is to provide value added services to deliver these eight areas to your organization.
November
Where did PSOs Come From?
In 2005 Congress enacted the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 (PSQIA). Their goal was to make it easier to share patient safety data so that patterns and solutions could be more rapidly developed.
The U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published the final rule that established PSOs on November 21, 2008. This rule puts into play the requirements established by Congress. Because there is a 60 day waiting period the PSO rule will take legal effect on January 19, 2009 but the PSOs are already being established and listed. The Peminic-Greeley PSO is an officially listed PSO.
October
I see ’PSWP’ used a lot. What is that?
PSWP is shorthand for Patient Safety Work Product. The PSO collects PSWP and aggregates them to help develop the Patient Safety recommendations. When you use your Patient Safety Evaluation System to declare an analysis, or data, or even a series of notes as PSWP and it is submitted to the PSO it gains an additional level of confidentiality and protection.
The key points to remember are:
- Your organization establishes a Patient Safety Evaluation System (think of that as an overarching systems that covers parts of your reporting, cause analysis and patient safety data systems)
- Based on that PSES some material is declared PSWP to give it additional protection
- PSWP and other data is submitted to the PSO, where it is aggregated and then recommendations and lessons learned are returned to the PSO members
- If we take action on these aggregated recommendations it reduces our overall cost of learning and reduces the risks in health care
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