The Patient Safety Group

Introduction - eCUSP

Dr. Peter Pronovost led a team at The Johns Hopkins Hospital charged with developing a comprehensive patient safety program, which resulted in CUSP or Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program.

CUSP Flow Chart

CUSP was designed:

• to be implemented sequentially in work units,

• to improve the culture of safety,

• to allow staff to focus safety efforts on unit-specific problems,

• and to include rigorous data collection through which tangible improvements in patient safety are empirically derived.


	Project Management Tutorial (13 Mb)

eCUSP is a web-based program allowing health care organizations to manage, monitor, record and share all their improvement work. It can also provide a mechanism for CUSP to be well-organized and monitored, while providing the impetus for identifying and managing safety and quality initiatives, and sharing work within a hospital system or throughout the entire health care industry. This program provides an avenue of open communication for all staff from senior executives to unit clerks.

eCUSP is a terrific tool for quality improvement, risk management, and safety project management.

eCUSP is accessed by member organizations for an inexpensive annual fee.

How eCUSP works...

The Joint Commission has approved new 2008 Leadership Standards. Organization Culture and System Performance are an integral part of the accreditation manuals and are requirements for accreditation. An organization must comply with these standards to maintain accreditation. The introduction to this section states:, "In a culture of safety and quality, all individuals are focused on maintaining excellence in performance. They accept safety and quality as personal responsibilities, and work together to minimize any harm that might result from unsafe or poor quality of care, treatment, and services." eCUSP is the perfect tool to not only improve culture but adhere to Joint Commission standards.

Joint Commission 2008 Leadership Standard - Organization Culture and System Performance
Acronyms for all the accreditation programs listed are: AHC - Ambulatory Health Care, BHC - Behavioral Health Care, HAP - Hospital Accreditation Program, CAH - Critical Access Hospitals, LAB - Laboratory, LTC - Long Term Care, LTC 2 - Long Term Care 2 (Joint Commission evaluation is substantially based on Medicare/Medicaid SNF/NF Certification evaluation), OBS - Office-Based Surgery, OME - Home Care

Contact us now for a demonstration, to ask additional questions or to get access to our sample program.

CUSP (Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program) was developed by the Johns Hopkins Medicine Quality and Safety Research Group and the Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. Copyright 2003-2007 by Johns Hopkins HealthCare reserved. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins HealthCare LLC.