In pursuit of our mission to improve patient safety and reduce risk, The Sullivan Group (TSG) held our semi-annual gathering of the Risk, Safety, and Quality (RSQ™) Collaborative in mid-November. The RSQ Collaborative, formed in 2010, is an elite group of nationally and internationally recognized clinical champions that share TSG’s passion for reducing medical risk, the frequency of medical errors, and ultimately saving patient’s lives.

The most rewarding part of these gatherings is brainstorming with the group to identify new and creative ways to deliver practical, scalable solutions that change clinician behavior, increase quality of care, and decrease the variability in delivery of care across the spectrum of healthcare. This includes identifying gaps in both nursing and medical risk and safety education followed by a free-for-all discussion of outside-the-box ideas. This open networking uncovered risk and patient safety education opportunities in geriatrics, performance-based reimbursement, urgent care, telemedicine for psychiatry and stroke, and nursing fundamentals. The free-for-all addressed issues related to human factors engineering, heuristics, wearable intelligence, clinical decision support and an array of illuminating opportunities for the future.

We shared the results of a productive year in the education creation space – 26 new courses have been released, increasing the total accredited CE/CME courses in the TSG library to 239. What’s more, 45,273 courses have been taken to date in 2015 for both CE and CME combined.

The Collaborative also welcomed Dr. Keith Mausner, who will be contributing to our emergency medicine and trauma topics.

In the theme of celebrating successes, TSG highlighted a publication in partnership with HCA on the success of their Pitocin protocols reducing NICU admissions and C-section rates. Read the study here.

Dr. Tom Syzek, TSG VP of e-Learning, and Wanda Blackford, TSG Director of Education, previewed recommendations in the evolution of course layout to achieve best practices in e-Learning and accommodate learning preferences (audio, video, mobile) of busy healthcare professionals.

These periodic gatherings keep us tied into our mission and tuned to the real-time risk and concerns of the medical industry through our active clinical champions; in addition, they give us relevant direction for the coming year.