Innovating Health Care Risk Management for JTS and DAF

As the Pentagon prepares today’s forces for a near-peer fight against a formidable military adversary, the Military Health System faces a daunting challenge in providing critical life-saving support for large-scale and dispersed operations. The Military Health System (MHS), a sprawling $55.8 billion healthcare network that serves 9.6 million beneficiaries through 38 hospitals, consumes 7.2% of the annual defense budget. Alarmingly, most military treatment facilities (MTFs) are situated in remote locations, far from larger military and civilian hospitals. This isolation forces many military medical providers to take significant risks and handle cases beyond their expertise, dramatically increasing the likelihood of adverse patient outcomes and medical malpractice.  The JTS is concerned about future casualties because the distances to hospitals in the Pacific are so great. In the future, a lack of US air superiority could prohibit quick evacuations. These conditions likely mean that the golden-hour handoff to a surgical team will not be possible. The golden hour is the critical time window for trauma patients to receive a series of life-saving interventions, starting at the point of injury and transitioning to handoff to a surgical team. If wounded Airmen are unable to get to higher levels of care, special operations medics will need more skills and guidelines to execute on those skills. The mission of JTS is to improve outcomes for combat casualties from the strategic level down to the scene of conflict through evidence-driven performance improvement. JTS is seeking to improve Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) to optimize patient care in remote medical facilities. Additionally, QI Path can improve how CPGs are executed in the field, and ‘tune’ them for specific contexts, (i.e. Iraq, Ukraine, Indo Pacom), Role 2 MTF vs Role 3 and 4, as well as different supply chain profiles, and this applies well in readiness for the next conflict.  The agency desires to proactively identify risks and vulnerabilities, and needs a central platform to view and analyze data.  Air Force hospitals could save $10 million in medical malpractice and direct costs associated with patient safety issues each year using QI Path’s easy-to-use, digitized risk analysis platform and restore consumer confidence in the MHS. QI Path was founded in 2011 in response to reports that preventable medical errors kill more than 100,000 patients every year in US hospitals. Studies show that most of these deadly errors are caused by systemic process issues, not by human performance deficiencies. QI Path is a SaaS company that offers a web-based, enterprise software platform to proactively identify and mitigate operational risks. QI Path leverages lean six sigma, provides leadership with insight, prioritizes risks, and empowers and engages operational staff in risk management.