This innovation describes the Veteran Health Administration (VHA) National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) development of a technique to combine proactive risk assessments with reactive risk assessments with the goal of improving patient safety on a single topic across multiple facilities.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center developed an electronic trigger tool that alerts the care team of unrelated abnormal findings and provides a companion follow-up process, with the goal of improving communication of radiologic abnormalities. The first 13 months of the innovation resulted in shared patient findings and care plans for 888 out of 932 (95%) targeted ED patient care episodes with abnormal radiologic findings.