Tejal K. Gandhi, MD, MPH

Director of Patient Safety, Partners HealthCare

Dr. Gandhi is a board certified internist and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She received her MD and MPH from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, and trained at Duke University Medical Center. Her undergraduate training at Cornell University was in biochemistry.

Dr. Gandhi’s research interests focus on patient safety and reducing error using information systems. She won the 2009 John Eisenberg award for her contributions to understanding the epidemiology and possible prevention strategies for medical errors in the outpatient setting. Dr. Gandhi was the Executive Director of Quality and Safety at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for 10 years, and in that role, she worked to redesign systems to reduce medical errors and improve quality. Currently, Dr. Gandhi is Director of Patient Safety at Partners HealthCare. In this role, she is helping to lead the efforts to standardize and implement patient safety best practices across the system.

May 2^nd

Reducing Costs by Improving Patient Safety

On behalf of Partners HealthCare, I am proud to announce that our hospitals have pledged to join the Partnership For Patients. Led by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), this initiative brings together a broad coalition around the vision of preventing avoidable injuries and reducing health care costs by improving quality.

Taking the pledge was an easy decision for Partners HealthCare, as it reflects our long-held commitment to improving patient safety. We have been at the forefront of patient safety research, and our work confirms time and again that robust patient safety mechanisms improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.

Improving Patient Safety by Reducing Readmissions

This week Partners HealthCare hospitals will recognize National Patient Safety Awareness Week, an occasion to highlight advances in preventing health care errors and mitigating patient injury caused by such errors.

One of the key ways Partners HealthCare is working to improve patient safety is by reducing avoidable readmissions. Reducing readmissions is a challenging yet critical initiative in providing quality patient care, especially at the crucial time when a patient transitions from the hospital.

Safe and Effective Patient Care Transitions Are Our Priority

Effective patient-care transitions and care coordination are both challenging and critical to providing quality patient care. Partners HealthCare has been working successfully to improve systems locally and at the national level since 2001.

Why is this work important? We do not have to look far for examples of individual patients who were affected by a poorly managed transition or “hand-off.” One such patient was previously on Warfarin (a blood thinner) at home prior to major heart surgery. She was put on Heparin (another blood thinner) while in the hospital to prevent a blood clot and possible stroke. At discharge, her Warfarin was not restarted, her Heparin was not continued and there was no mention of either medication in the discharge summary from the surgical service. The efforts to clarify why the patient was no longer on anticoagulation took several hours of clinician time at her rehabilitation facility. Fortunately, she did not have a stroke because an alert clinician caught the error and moved quickly to rectify it.

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