Advisory: Detecting and Reporting Patient Safety Risks in Virtual Care Delivery

Through a CRICO grant-funded project, Mara Schonberg, MD, MPH, sought to learn if providing women age 40-49 with information about their risk of breast cancer is useful to them when deciding on breast cancer screening and prevention interventions. Participants completed a pre-test, received their personalized breast cancer risk report, saw their primary care clinician, and completed a post-test.

Before many of her colleagues really “got” what she was doing, Dr. Kriegel was trying to systematically make care better and safer for their patients too. Today this places her at the center of a data and dollar-driven movement to reduce preventable bad outcomes in ambulatory medicine.

This collection of case studies is designed to help all members of a multidisciplinary team reduce the risk of patient harm in the course of diagnosis and treatment. Office-based events that trigger malpractice cases present valuable opportunities to identify vulnerabilities in communication, clinical judgment, and patient care systems.