Our Solution

Our goal is to help clients pursue zero patient harm.   

In health care, high reliability organizations represent the elimination of unwarranted variation in care delivery — which improves clinical results and reduces costs. Johns Hopkins helps health care organizations reach this level of clinical and operational excellence.

Our high reliability organization assessment and implementation consulting program provides health care leaders a window into Johns Hopkins Medicine’s delivery of consistently safe, high quality and high-value care. By working with Johns Hopkins, stakeholders will gain a deeper understanding of the structures, strategies and resources needed to take patient safety and quality to the next level. We help health care organizations increase patient safety and improve outcomes, and we use evidence-based practice to sustain these achievements over time.

Our Approach

The Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality is a world leader in tackling preventable harm, reducing medical errors, improving clinical outcomes and reducing waste in health care delivery. Clients learn from our global quality improvement leaders, who have the skills, concepts and knowledge to help embed health care improvement efforts into the client organization.

Our high reliability organization program focuses on leadership practices, culture, organizational systems and structures to support patient safety, process improvement and clinical practice. We provide an integrated framework to govern the way individuals work together to achieve the mission of ending preventable harm, continuously improving patient outcomes and experience, and eliminating waste in health care.

Program areas of focus include:

Governance, leadership and accountability

The governing body provides oversight for quality and safety wherever care is delivered within the health system. Shared accountability flows from the board to the bedside. 

Systems thinking, risk identification and mitigation

Members of the organization understand upstream and downstream implications of their work, and partner effectively with colleagues within and across departmental silos.

Capacity and infrastructure

Structure and capacity for quality, safety and service are developed collaboratively using a fractal model. An enabling infrastructure is resourced to provide expertise, and to coordinate and support the work.

Transparency, communication and teamwork

Multidisciplinary collaboration, coordination of care and patient communication is important for clinical and administrative functions with staff, patients and families.

Insight and innovation

Insights are gained through synthesis of meaningful, accurate, actionable information from all available internal and external sources of data.

Our program can be customized to help health care organizations on their journey to high reliability.