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Patient Safety
Patient safety means focusing on reducing and eliminating accidental or preventable injuries from medical care. While Medica doesn't provide direct medical care, we can still help our providers and members reduce medical errors and keep health care safe and effective.
How Our Patient Safety Program Works
Medical errors are more common than many people realize. A government report published by the Institute of Medicine in 2000 found that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die each year because of medical errors in hospitals. Accidents — and near-misses — can also happen in clinics, pharmacies and other care facilities, and even at home, when patients take medicine and follow treatment orders on their own.
How You Can Help
Information is probably the single best patient safety tool. When you talk to your doctor, your surgeon, your pharmacist or any other care provider, it's very important to ask questions and make sure you understand the answers. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has some helpful fact sheets to get you started (these links will take you outside the Medica site).
Our Patient Safety Efforts
Medica takes part in many programs that support patient safety.
- Our Quality Resources page provides easy-to-use quality comparisons among primary care clinic systems and hospitals in the Medica network.
- Our nurses visit primary care clinics as part of our Quality Review programs. The quality review includes checks for safety features such as safe medicine storage and emergency medical equipment kept in good working order.