Joe Kiani is Executive Chairman at Willow Laboratories and Founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. He makes the point that the vast majority of medical harm is avoidable through the implementation of evidence-based healthcare best practices. Technology, particularly AI and remote monitoring of data from medical devices, is crucial for creating predictive models that can alert clinicians to problems and identify root causes of medical errors. The goal is to unite all healthcare stakeholders to work collaboratively toward zero preventable deaths.

Joe explains, "In the US, we lose about 200,000 people a year, and about 15 times that rate is the serious harm caused by medical errors. Worldwide, we think the number is close to three million. And the reason we call it preventable is that the vast majority could be eliminated if evidence-based practices were put in place. As you can imagine, people make mistakes, and there are a lot of medical errors that may not be preventable because there is an evidence-based practice in place to avoid them. But when it comes to things like hospital-acquired infection, VTE, sepsis, failure to rescue, CLATSI, there are known evidence-based practices that, if possible, put them in place, we might get to zero, and if not zero, we'd be pretty close to zero."

"Well, honestly, all patients are at risk. If you want to focus on those most at risk, we've got to miss the ones that really go wrong. If we can imagine someone going in for a simple procedure, even a cosmetic one, like a hip replacement, and the procedure goes really well."

"But while there's a catheter inside the artery, someone could walk in and, without cleaning their hands, touch the patient, the bacteria could enter the bloodstream and cause a serious infection. So really, you've got to create a culture of safety where you look for ways to mitigate people's mistakes, and those are what we call evidence-based practices. There are about 20 of them, starting with cultural patient safety, on the Patient Safety Movement Foundation website that people can freely download and implement, and therefore not get into these problems."

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