Debriefing is an important strategy for learning about and making improvements in individual, team, and system performance. It is one of the central learning tools in simulation training and is also recommended after significant clinical events.

This primer describes stressors relevant to the healthcare response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of care deliverers and the significant personal toll the pandemic is taking on individuals who work in the healthcare system. This primer highlights foundational patient safety strategies – signage, workflow review and redesign, checklists and simulations – whose implementation is more important than ever for keeping patients and healthcare providers safe in the age of COVID-19.

Clinical decision support systems provide information or recommendations to help clinicians make safe and evidence-based decisions. The use and sophistication of these systems have grown markedly over the past decade, due to widespread implementation of electronic health records and advances in clinical informatics.

Pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum year present a complex set of patient safety challenges. Numerous maternal safety initiatives aim to prevent errors and harm, while enhancing readiness to address maternal complications.

Over the past decade, the opioid epidemic has taken the lives of tens of thousands of patients. Much of the epidemic can be ascribed to inappropriate prescribing of opioids, despite knowledge of the safety risks they pose. Current efforts to improve opioid safety have primarily focused on reducing opioid prescribing.

The widespread implementation of electronic health records has caused a sea change in health care and in medical practice. The digitization of health care data has had some positive effects on patient safety, but it has also created new patient safety concerns.

This piece explores the role medical scribes play in health care, how to implement and evaluate a scribe program, and recommendations to reduce variations in scribe practice.

This piece explores various practical and philosophical issues that could shape the adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence systems in medicine.

This piece explores the key role of emergency medical services in providing care to patients at their moment of greatest need, safety hazards in this field, and opportunities for improvement.

This piece spotlights the need for educational and cultural transformation to achieve sustainable progress in patient outcomes and health.

This perspective examines the troubling decline in maternal health outcomes in the United States and summarizes recent national initiatives to improve safety in maternity care.

This piece explores health care simulation including the four main methods used and the evidence base for its impact on learning and patient care.

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Patient engagement is widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of patient safety. Research in 2018 demonstrates that patient engagement, when done correctly, can help health care systems identify safety hazards, regain trust after they occur, and codesign sustainable solutions.

This piece explores concerns regarding the use of copy and paste in electronic health records and offers potential strategies to improve clinical documentation accuracy.

This piece explores how patient-facing technologies can enable patients to be more responsible for their care and improve the way clinicians practice.

This piece highlights four key lessons that the authors believe are useful for clinicians and health care organizations that seek to identify, prevent, and mitigate electronic health record–related safety issues.

Patient engagement in safety has evolved from obscurity to maturity over the past two decades. This Annual Perspective highlights emerging approaches to engaging patients and caregivers in safety efforts, including novel technological innovations, and summarizes the existing evidence on the efficacy of such approaches.

A considerable body of evidence demonstrates worsened clinical outcomes for patients admitted to the hospital on weekends compared to those admitted on weekdays. This Annual Perspective summarizes innovative studies published in 2017 that helped clarify the magnitude of this effect and identify possible mechanisms by which it occurs.