Interdisciplinary Horizons for Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety

Suboptimal quality and safety are a well-recognized and documented healthcare problem across the globe. Too often, predicted care outcomes are not achieved, and insufficient care frequently generates unnecessary costs through preventable underuse, overuse, and misuse of resources, services and interventions. Healthcare also causes too many safety hazards. Even in developed countries such as Switzerland, Australia, Great Britain and Denmark, patients frequently incur preventable harm from substandard care practices, such as insufficient hand hygiene, missing or uncompleted checklists, and surgical procedures that take place in underequipped operating rooms. Such preventable incidents harm at least 43 million patients across the globe each year at a cost of $132 billion in excess health care spending, evidencing that preventable deviations from care standards are a serious global health burden that harm more patients than widespread diseases such as AIDS and cancer. The proposed workshop is designed to gather leading international scholars and thought leaders from communication science and health-related fields (e.g., public health, medicine, information technology, etc.) to engage into stimulating discussions that (1) calibrate their disciplinary knowledge-to-date on high-quality and safe health care practices, and (2) elaborate needed interdisciplinary, international research collaborations within the following six “hot buttons” of healthcare quality and patient safety: (1) Big data, (2) digital health, (3) healthy aging, (4) patient-centered care, (5) patient and family activation, and (6) team integration and coordination.