Patient Safety

◾ Time to receive a call back from a provider or physician ◾ Waiting time for pain medication

The consequences of lack of timeliness are quite extensive and grave. Timeliness has a tremendous impact on morbidity and mortality, as follows:

◾ Lack of timeliness can result in emotional distress, physical harm, and higher treatment costs (Boudreau et al., 2004). ◾ Stroke patients’ mortality and long-term disability are largely influenced by the timeliness of therapy (Kwan et al., 2004). ◾ Timely delivery of appropriate care also can help reduce mortality and morbidity for chronic conditions such as kidney disease (Kinchen et al., 2002). ◾ Timely delivery of childhood immunizations helps maximize protection from vaccine-preventable diseases while minimizing risks to the child and reducing the chance of disease outbreaks (Luman et al., 2005). ◾ Timely antibiotic treatments are associated with improved clinical outcomes (Houck and Bratzler, 2005).

The patient has a sense of urgency (real or imagined) about the state of his/her condition. The patient’s assessment of the value of the care received is a function of the caregiver’s response to the patient’s notion of urgency. Healthcare should happen promptly, for the sake of both patients and healthcare providers. Today, most patients must wait on the telephone, wait for appointments, wait in the doctor’s office, and wait for test results. Waiting can take an emotional toll on patients and their family members. In the worst-case scenario, waiting can be medically harmful. Anxiety and unexplained delays create a lethal mix of emotions that can derail any notion of value in the service received.

Patient safety is a critical component of the value proposition. Without patient safety, it is impossible for a patient to entertain the notion of value in a healthcare service encounter. The IOM defines patient safety as “freedom from accidental injury due to medical care or medical errors” (Kohn et al., 2000). In 1999, the IOM published To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which called for a national effort to reduce medical errors and