Prioritizing Risk and Patient Safety in 2025: Five Focus Areas

Thinking about your 2025 risk and patient safety goals? Guest author, Lori Atkinson, explains why now is a great time to reflect and offers up five key areas to concentrate your efforts in 2025.

I love this time of year. It's a great time to reflect on and celebrate the year's accomplishments and begin planning for and prioritizing next year's goals.  

Risk management and patient safety remain a priority as healthcare evolves to address new challenges. Advances in technology, changing patient needs, and emerging risks demand that healthcare leaders and clinicians remain focused on minimizing risk and maximizing safety.  

Here are some ideas of where to focus your efforts in 2025: 

1. Optimize Surgical Safety   

• Why it matters: Surgery carries inherent risks, from infection to complications, making surgical safety a critical focus area. According to our malpractice claims data, surgical allegations are the number one cause of injuries and claims, both in frequency and total costs. Communication breakdowns among operating room (OR) teams are a top contributing factor to injuries and claims. 
• 2025 Focus: Artificial intelligence (AI) assisted surgical robots, data-driven risk assessments, and team communication tools can help improve surgical outcomes. These strategies can help identify at-risk patients, streamline workflows in the OR, and ensure everyone is on the same page, enabling potential errors to be identified and addressed promptly. 

    2. Reduce Diagnostic Errors

• Why it matters: Diagnostic errors affect nearly 12 million people annually in the U.S., leading to significant harm and even fatalities. Diagnostic errors are a top allegation against clinicians and hospitals. Almost half of all diagnostic error claims begin with issues that arise during the initial diagnostic assessment.  
  
• 2025 Focus: Implementing decision-support tools to help clinicians rule out potentially serious diagnoses can help reduce these errors. AI-powered clinical decision-support tools and validated risk prediction models can analyze patient records to detect trends and highlight possible diagnoses that clinicians may overlook.

   3. Boost Obstetric Team Performance

• Why it matters: Obstetric (OB) emergencies like postpartum hemorrhage, fetal distress, or shoulder dystocia can become critical within minutes. Simulation team training allows OB clinicians and the team to practice managing these emergencies, honing their ability to make quick, effective decisions. The result is faster intervention and a better chance of preventing adverse outcomes for both mother and child.

• 2025 Focus: Institute OB emergency simulation training and drills, including debriefing after drills, which encourages a non-punitive learning environment where teams can discuss mistakes openly and focus on improving. Simulation sessions can be recorded and analyzed to provide valuable feedback on team performance, response times, and clinical decisions. 

   4. Focus on Safe Transitions of Care

• Why it matters: Transitions of care, the patient's movement between different healthcare settings or clinicians as their care needs and condition change, such as hospital discharges and transfers to senior living centers, are exceptionally high risk due to potential lapses in communication and care continuity. Communication breakdowns among clinicians and care teams are a top contributing factor in patient injury and malpractice claims. 
• 2025 Focus: Technology can be leveraged to enhance real-time communication among care teams and provide clear discharge instructions to patients and their caregivers. Programs like medication reconciliation at transitions, communicating essential information to key stakeholders, and follow-up calls help reduce errors and improve understanding of patient care plans. 

   5. Reduce Fall-related Injuries

• Why it matters: According to The National Council on Aging (NCOA), falls remain the leading cause of injury and death for older Americans. Fall-related injuries come with significant economic and personal costs. Failure to prevent falls and fall-related injuries is a top malpractice allegation against hospitals and senior living organizations. 

• 2025 Focus: Implement a comprehensive fall reduction program to reduce patient/resident falls in your organization. This includes creating a dedicated fall prevention team, using scenario-based education and training to improve care team members' critical thinking skills, and analyzing fall events using tools to detect causal and contributing factors and redesign safer care processes.  

Resources 

AHRQ Toolkit to Promote Safe Surgery https://www.ahrq.gov/hai/tools/surgery/index.html  

AHRQ Diagnostic Safety and Quality https://www.ahrq.gov/diagnostic-safety/index.html  

AIM Patient Safety Bundles https://saferbirth.org/patient-safety-bundles/  

AHRQ Transitions of Care https://www.ahrq.gov/topics/transitions-care.html 

AHRQ Preventing Falls https://www.ahrq.gov/topics/falls.html  

Curi clients, we can help you plan your 2025 risk and patient safety goals. Sign in and take one of our online CME Risk Assessments or Additional Risk Assessments to identify potential care process vulnerabilities, use the automated report to view your opportunities for performance improvement, and create your 2025 action plan.  

If you have any questions about this topic, please call 800-328-5532 to speak with one of Curi Advisory's Risk Solutions experts. 

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