Market-Based Controls to Enhance Patient Safety

I just finished reading a great journal article in the Quality and Safety in Health Care Journal that proposes using Market-based Control Mechanisms similar to those found in Kyoto Protocols which sets a limit on Emissions and Carbon Markets utilizing Cap and Trade of Emission Credits. The authors theorize that setting a so called Patient Safety Price and allowing the market find ways to reduce and limit patient related adverse events. Here is the abstract:

ABSTRACT

A new model is proposed for enhancing patient safety using market-based control (MBC), inspired by successful approaches to environmental governance. Emissions trading , enshrined in the Kyoto protocol, set a carbon price and created a carbon market—is it possible to set a patient safety price and let the marketplace find ways of reducing clinically adverse events? To ‘‘cap and trade,’’ a regulator would need to establish system-wide and organisation-specific targets , based on the cost of adverse events, create a safety market for trading safety credits and then police the market. Organisations are given a clear policy signal to reduce adverse event rates, are told by how much, but are free to find mechanisms best suited to their local needs. The market would inevitably generate novel ways of creating safety credits, and accountability becomes hard to evade when adverse events are explicitly measured and accounted for in an organisation’s bottom line.

Something like this would really help reduce Adverse Events and of course lead to greater importance and visibility of BMETS and Biomed departments. As a matter of fact, this will help move us as a profession away from being viewed as just equipment repairs and will allow us to be viewed more as the “Patient Safety Specialists” we really are!

Not to mention that a Cap and Trade model will turn Biomed from a Money Saving (or as some administrators view it as a money wasting) operation to a Money making one by helping reduce adverse affects thereby allowing their facility to trade unused Patient Safety Credits.

What do you think?

Full Journal Article: Market-based Control Mechanisms for Patient Safety