About Us
The Patient Safety Group
The Patient Safety Group is a Massachusetts LLC formed in 2004. Our mission is to encourage a culture of safety by providing tools that allow health care organizations the ability to communicate, collaborate, improve and share. Our initial program, eCUSP (electronic unit-based patient safety program), provides motivated caregivers the opportunity to manage, monitor, organize, account for and share their patient safety efforts. Our subsequent programs, the AHRQ Culture Survey for Hospitals, Medical Offices and Nursing Homes, allows health care organizations to easily measure their workplace culture to help drive improvement initiatives.

History
Sorrel King and Jay King have become a formidable patient safety advocacy combination. The message is simple. Our health care system must take the issue of patient safety and quality improvement seriously, and hospitals must resolve to commit the entire organization to this effort.

• Sorrel and the Josie King Foundation are working feverishly from the patient's point of view, getting the word out, working on projects with hospitals throughout the country, impacting health care organizations with her DVD presentation and newly created Care Journal.
  
• Jay King and the Patient Safety Group are working to create affordable tools to assist with health care quality improvement.
  

Sorrel King
Co-Founder
Josie King Foundation
Sorrel King has turned the loss of her child, Josie, from medical error into a devoted effort to making a difference on the issue of patient safety in health care organizations. Through her efforts, The Josie King Foundation has led safety efforts at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, developed a patient empowered call system with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, created a video to help inspire providers, developed a Care Journal to help patients manage and monitor their hospital stay, spoken at the leading healthcare conferences across the country, along with several other helpful projects and ideas to improve the quality and safety of healthcare. Sorrel is the one of the nation’s most recognized patient advocates.

Jay King
Executive Director
Working with Sorrel in the early stages of the Josie King Foundation, Jay decided that his technical skills could lend to the improvement of healthcare, so the King family founded The Patient Safety Group. Jay's background includes the founding of an educational software company, EDVantage Software, that developed language arts' products for the K-12 school marketplace. Subsequently, with the acquisition of EDVantage by Riverdeep Interactive, his responsibilities included managing the development and delivery of web-based content by the nation's leader in interactive, online K-12 educational materials.

Brian Canning
Chief Technology Officer
Brian, with over 25 years of IT and software engineering experience to his credit, has most recently held the position of Chief Technology Officer at TRA Global, a media and marketing research company providing television viewing and buying results to advertisers. Previously, he was CTO at PhotoTLC where he built PhotoTLC's complex IT network, customized to support the unique requirements of each retail partner. Before that, as CTO of Teacher Universe, an online teacher technology training company that was successfully acquired by Riverdeep Inc., Brian was responsible for the company's ERP and e-commerce initiatives. In addition, he spent eight years in various IT and software engineering management positions at Apple Computer Inc. in both the U.S. and Ireland.


To Err is Human
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published a report, To Err is Human, Building a Safer Health System, in which they identified patient safety as a significant nationwide problem and stated that efforts to address this problem should focus on systems and not providers. Despite this, there is little evidence to suggest that safety has improved as a result of this report.

American Hospital Association statistics state that at least 44,000 and perhaps as many as 98,000 Americans die in hospitals every year due to medical errors. Using the lower estimate, this number amounts to the 8th-leading cause of death, for something that is a preventable adverse event. This is a number greater than those caused by breast cancer, motor-vehicle accidents or AIDS.

The Institute of Medicine's publication states, "total national costs (lost income, lost household production, disability, health care costs) are estimated to be between $17 billion and $29 billion for preventable adverse events." The publication identifies as one of the greatest contributors to preventable adverse events "the failure of communication, primarily the identification of safety concerns and the efforts to improve the culture of safety within a health care organization."