Improving patient safety and quality in India's largest hospital network through a dashboard driven approach - The Apollo Quality Program

Background Quality and patient safety are the driving forces for resilient healthcare organizations. However, the healthcare leadership is central to the role of establishing the values of quality and patient safety in the organization. This task becomes extremely challenging when the safety culture has to be built across a large hospital network. Methods A comprehensive patient safety program, the Apollo Quality Program(AQP), structured in the form of a patient-safety dashboard was used as a tool to establish and strengthen the fabric of quality and safety across a large hospital network in India. The dashboard consisted of essential patient safety parameters that were measurable and objective. This dashboard was implemented across 41-hospitals of the network and improvement data monitored. These 41-hospitals varied in size and on basis of their bed strength they were categorized into 3 groups(A,B and C). For this study, the results have been presented from 2011 to 2021. Results The overall AQP scores improved indicating holistic enhancement of patient safety across Apollo Hospitals. Sustained progress, through the last nine years, was observed for various patient safety parameters in the AQP dashboard, across 41-hospitals of the network. Conclusion AQP is an innovative methodology that incorporates all the essential tenets of patient-safety. The programme led to a progressive improvement in patient-safety over the nine-years of its implementation. The enhancement was visible through compliance to the various parameters of AQP. The AQP empowered the leadership to retrospect and analyse each of their units’ performance for patient-safety and quality in systematic manner.