Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center Awarded 5-Star Hospital Award by Patient Safety Movement Foundation for Efforts to Eliminate Preventable Deaths

The Patient Safety Movement Foundation presented Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) with the Foundation’s 5-Star Hospital award for making commitments in alignment with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation’s evidence-based Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS). The APSS addresses patient safety challenges that hospitals are facing daily and offer solutions designed to help hospitals eliminate preventable patient deaths.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201028005223/en/

The Patient Safety Movement Foundation presented the award virtually to Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s (from left to right): Associate Chief Quality Officer, Quality Assurance & Safety, Lori B. Key, MBA, RN, and Chief Quality & Value Officer, George T. Blike, MD, MHCDS (Photo: Business Wire)

“Each year, more than 200,000 patients die from preventable hospital errors in the U.S., and 4.8 million across the globe. Those numbers are simply not acceptable and unthinkable,” said David Mayer, MD, Patient Safety Movement Foundation CEO. “Our 5-Star Award acknowledges the commitment these organizations have made toward achieving ZERO preventable deaths. The leadership demonstrated by these leaders is a model others can follow in instituting best practices in patient care.”

Mayer virtually presented the award to Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Associate Chief Quality Officer, Quality Assurance & Safety, Lori B. Key, MBA, RN, and Chief Quality & Value Officer, George T. Blike, MD, MHCDS. You can view the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yevVBFjc-3M&feature=youtu.be

This award is a result of the collective work of DHMC employees and leaders who adopted the principles of high reliability and demonstrate those behaviors by establishing safety behaviors, reporting opportunities to improve systems and processes, and by providing individual expertise in designing and implementing quality and safety improvements.

"We’re very honored to receive this award and very pleased to be part of this movement and committed to a group that has the philosophy of ‘all teach, all learn and all improving’ when it comes to patient safety,” said Blike. “The spirit of sharing, learning, growth and improvement is what we value as an organization."

More than 4,793 hospitals across 48 countries have committed to implementing one or multiple of the APSS developed by the Patient Safety Movement Foundation workgroups. For more information about the 5-Star Hospital program, please visit:

https://patientsafetymovement.org/partners/5-star-hospital-program/

About Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health: DARTMOUTH-HITCHCOCK HEALTH (D-HH), New Hampshire’s only academic health system and the state’s largest private employer, serves a population of 1.9 million across northern New England. D-H provides access to more than 2,000 providers in almost every area of medicine, delivering care at its flagship hospital, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH. DHMC was named again in 2020 as the #1 hospital in New Hampshire by U.S. News & World Report, and recognized for high performance in 9 clinical specialties and procedures. Dartmouth-Hitchcock also includes the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, one of only 51 NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the nation; the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the state’s only children’s hospital; affiliated member hospitals in Lebanon, Keene, and New London, NH, and Windsor, VT, and Visiting Nurse and Hospice for Vermont and New Hampshire; and 24 Dartmouth-Hitchcock clinics that provide ambulatory services across New Hampshire and Vermont. The D-H system trains nearly 400 residents and fellows annually, and performs world-class research, in partnership with the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the White River Junction VA Medical Center in White River Junction, VT.

About the Patient Safety Movement Foundation: Each year, more than 200,000 people die unnecessarily in U.S. hospitals. Worldwide, 4.8 million lives are similarly lost. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) is a global non-profit that offers free tools to help achieve ZERO preventable deaths from hospital errors. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation was established through the support of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare to reduce that number of preventable deaths to ZERO. Improving patient safety requires a collaborative effort from all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government, employers, and private payers. PSMF’s World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit brings together the world’s best minds for thought-provoking discussions and new ideas to challenge the status quo. Our Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS) provide evidence-based processes to help hospitals eliminate errors. Our Open Data Pledge encourages healthcare technology companies to share the data for which their products are purchased. Visit patientsafetymovement.org.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201028005223/en/