History
In 1997, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a group of business leaders and a local philanthropic organization in Pittsburgh, came together to explore how to bring new jobs, capital investment, and a better quality of life to the 10-county region of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
The Conference zeroed in on health care—the region's largest economic sector, employing one in eight workers and generating more than $7.2 billion in business. Pressures on the healthcare sector were resulting in operating losses, bankruptcies, consolidations, and a high rate of employee turnover.
The effort resulted in the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, or PRHI, a nonprofit community consortium that would respond to these challenges by improving quality and safety—the first to adapt and apply industrial improvement methods to healthcare settings.
PRHI was led by Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD, President of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, who recruited former Alcoa Chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to help spearhead the effort.
Then, in 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued its report "To Err is Human," a national wake-up call to the crisis in healthcare quality and safety. It revealed that up to 98,000 people were dying every year from medical errors in U.S. hospitals. A subsequent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that another 80,000 people were dying each year from preventable hospital-acquired infections. By 2005, when the IOM called for the application of engineering principles to the daily work of health care, PRHI and its partners had been doing so—with stunning results—for about five years.
In fact, over the past decade, PRHI has changed the way the nation thinks and talks about health care. It is starting to prove its foundational premise: that improving the quality and safety of health care saves invaluable lives and scarce dollars.
Healthcare leaders and policymakers continue to consult with PRHI, following and replicating its progress throughout the state and nation.