Enhancing healthcare safety with artificial intelligence: Insights for health system executives

Coauthored by Heather Reed, Senior Director, Patient Safety Organization.

In an era of accelerating technological advancement, reshaping every aspect of our lives, artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a transformative force. In healthcare, we see AI’s profound effects every day, from how we decipher feedback, to how we allocate resources, to how we understand and diagnose diseases. And it’s constantly evolving, becoming more sophisticated, and pushing the boundaries of possibilities.

Patient safety is another area being rapidly transformed by the widespread acceptance and adoption of AI. For senior health system executives, understanding how AI can, and will, improve patient safety is not just a strategic advantage, but a critical imperative.

How is AI revolutionizing safety protocols in healthcare?

AI can be a powerful tool to improve safety, both inside and outside hospitals, by predicting harm, gathering and analyzing data, and supporting quality.¹ Groups like the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and the Biden-Harris administration have acknowledged the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, including its ability to create efficiencies, enhance diagnostic accuracy, personalize medicine, forecast outbreak and admission rates, and detect conditions like cancer or cardiovascular disease early. There are many opportunities to advance patient safety in particular, such as predicting risk of harmful events, enhancing diagnostic accuracy, and helping optimize event identification and analysis.

Harnessing the power of AI to improve safety and prevent harm

At Press Ganey, we’re constantly innovating to advance safety in healthcare, as we collectively pursue zero harm. Press Ganey’s AI-powered solutions will significantly enhance safety, and the overall patient experience—and we are continuing to roll out new technologies as part of our integrated platform.

Press Ganey is currently offering:

• Severity suggestion: The Press Ganey High Reliability Platform’s severity suggestion tool uses a large language model, trained on annotations from healthcare safety experts, to suggest harm classification based on the text in an initial patient safety event report. This method can uncover harm that might be missed, as limited resources and bandwidth hinder safety event review teams’ ability to thoroughly review, study, and classify all incidents that occur each day.

Press Ganey is continuing to develop AI solutions for safety, including:

• Text analytics: AI will analyze patient and workforce feedback, including open-ended survey responses, to extract safety themes, sentiments, and areas for improvement. It does this by processing and interpreting vast amounts of unstructured text data more efficiently than humans ever could. The results: more accurate safety event reporting and easily decipherable lessons learned from patient safety event documentation.
• Trend identification: AI will help detect new patterns and trends in patient safety. By continuously analyzing data, AI uncovers shifts in patient expectations, satisfaction levels, care quality, and safety, so healthcare providers can adapt and respond more effectively to the evolving landscape. This is a powerful way to analyze safety events for specific patient demographic groups.
• Root cause analysis: AI tools will help determine the underlying causes of patient dissatisfaction and safety issues. By correlating different data points, AI can then pinpoint specific factors contributing to problems, allowing for targeted improvements.

Overall, Press Ganey's future AI integration aims to provide deeper insights, improve predictive capabilities, and drive better decision-making across the care continuum.

Our work relates directly to the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to improving patient and healthcare work and safety, including their announcement of Press Ganey’s AI-enabled integrated analytics safety dashboard, to be built in 2025. This bold, first-of-its-kind dashboard will bring together crucial data on patient and workforce safety, safety culture, safety incident reporting, and patient perceptions of safety, in addition to continued AI analyses of Press Ganey Patient Safety Organization (PSO) data. These comprehensive tools will equip leaders with clear, prioritized, and actionable insights, including potential contributions of inequities in healthcare.

Artificial intelligence is poised to transform safety practices within healthcare systems. For senior executives, embracing AI solutions like those offered by Press Ganey is a strategic move toward enhancing patient safety, improving outcomes, and driving operational excellence. As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, staying ahead with innovative AI solutions will be crucial in ensuring a safer and more effective care environment.

For more information on how Press Ganey’s AI solutions can benefit your health system, reach out to a tech and safety expert here. Our experts will share how Press Ganey’s advanced tools help healthcare executives achieve safety goals. 

1. Bates DW, Levine D, Syrowatka A, Kuznetsova M, Craig KJT, Rui A, Jackson GP, Rhee K. The potential of artificial intelligence to improve patient safety: a scoping review. NPJ Digit Med. 2021 Mar 19;4(1):54. doi: 10.1038/s41746-021-00423-6. PMID: 33742085; PMCID: PMC7979747.