On the Road to Saving 440,000 Lives a Year!
On March 1st of 2006, Emily’s mother and I had to make the most difficult decision of our lives, which was to take our precious 2-year old girl, Emily, off of life support after a preventable medical error. In horrible, unimaginable situations like this, we all respond differently. However, as any father would be, I was completely and totally devastated emotionally. Even with that thought in mind, I still never questioned the existence of God. From that horrific day forward, I knew in my heart that He had to have a plan, I just had absolutely no idea, nor was I ever meant to even comprehend at that point, what exactly God’s plan was for my beautiful little girl’s short life here on earth.
As I frequently mention in many of my speaking engagements and lectures, as Emily’s father looking back over the past eight years, I have really come to believe that Emily’s short life was truly meant to save thousands from the same fate. In retrospect, I am also convinced that Emily’s life was actually meant to be the catalyst for all the positive change in attitudes and opinions on preventable medical errors and how the medical community responds and learns from them. This is precisely why I have always strived with my advocacy efforts, as well as, the programming of The Emily Jerry Foundation to be an active part of the overall “solution” to preventable medical errors, which by recent estimates are claiming more than 440,000 lives every year and are now sadly the third leading cause of death in the United States.
I am extremely pleased to say that the special Guardian Angel logo for the foundation, designed with Emily’s likeness, is very quickly becoming the “Gerber Baby” of patient safety. Most everyone in medicine and pharmacy recognizes it. More importantly to me, they really seem to comprehend the fact that it stands for all of this positive change that is, in fact, occurring in the underlying “culture of medicine” and how it’s being practiced, both here in the United States and abroad. In these ways, Emily lives on, and is truly responsible for saving many lives. My goal is to keep the momentum going forward and continue to inspire those in the medical field to never settle for “good enough” when it comes to patient safety.
When I first established The Emily Jerry Foundation, under these distinct premises, my primary motivation was to begin getting out and speaking to as many caregivers around the nation as possible. I wanted to share with them Emily’s story and the extremely important lessons that have been learned since her passing. My feeling was that the caregivers, hospital administrators, boards of trustees for medical facilities, etc., were the ones who could really impact the changes I was praying for, more quickly than anyone else.
Over the past three years, I have been blessed with the opportunity to speak before tens of thousands of people, all who play an integral part in patient safety in our healthcare system. I have already given more than 75 lectures, keynotes speeches, and presentations on patient safety and ways to reduce preventable medical errors at hospitals and medical conferences around the nation. It is extremely important to keep this wave of enthusiasm for our very important cause moving forward. This is precisely why I believe so strongly that The Emily Jerry Foundation needs to continue to reach and convey our vital messages to as many caregivers and healthcare administrators across the nation, as quickly and effectively, as possible.
According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), we currently have 5, 723 registered hospitals in the United States today. I know it’s a completely unrealistic goal to expect to be able to book the speaking engagements and patient safety symposiums, which have proven very effective over the past few years, at each and every single medical facility in our nation. This is exactly why we have developed The Emily Jerry Foundation’s new “Patient Safety Express” Educational Program, to effectively and efficiently reach, as many of these hospitals, as possible.
My plan is simple. If we can raise enough funds and donations to either purchase or lease a coach tour bus, similar to the one pictured above this article, I am going to make a personal commitment to our cause to live on the road for 12 to 18 months at a time, going to as many hospitals and patient safety functions around the country as humanly possible. Typically, I am only able to conduct roughly two to four speaking engagements and patient safety events per month via commercial airlines. With the “Patient Safety Express”, I will be able to more efficiently cover the entire United States visiting three to five hospitals per week. My very realistic goal then, subsequently, becomes approximately 156 to 260 hospitals and functions per year!
Please join me in this fight by donating toward this very important educational program and our vital “life saving” cause at emilyjerryfoundation.org/donate. If you would like to discuss corporate sponsorship for this program, please contact me directly at [email protected].
Thank You in Advance for your Support!
~Chris Jerry, Patient Safety Advocate
As I posted last month, I was incredibly thankful to be interviewed for Part 1 of Emily’s Story on Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org. If you are new to the site or missed that episode, click here to listen to Part 1.
Mark recently released Part 2 of our conversation which covers many topics including: overhauling systems vs. blaming individuals, pushing for a comprehensive national Pharmacy Tech policy, Public forgiveness of Eric Cropp, and much more! Click here to listen to Part 2 of my interview on the LeanBlog.org Podcast.
Mark’s blog is a great place to learn innovative information about best practices in medicine so please share with your network. As always thanks for your continued support!
photo credit: Ontario Trial Lawyers Association blog
Most of the public is completely unaware of this fact and many people in the medical community, who are cognizant, are in complete denial!
On March 1st 2006, five days after my beautiful daughter Emily’s second birthday, my wife and I had to make the worst decision of our entire lives, to take our little girl off of life support. That horrific day will always remain permanently burned into my memory and it haunts me every single day. It was only by the Grace of God and His new little angel Emily that truly saved me from myself in the years that followed this unimaginable tragedy.
It was also on that day, that I knew in my heart that my life had drastically changed forever. I absolutely understood that there was no way to bring my sweet Emily back, however, I also knew that I could find out exactly what happened to her and, subsequently, find ways to ensure that other babies, children, and their families, didn’t suffer a similar fate. I still continue to have, and have always had, the utmost respect for modern day science and medicine. After all, it was modern day medicine and the advances that have been made in research and development of new leading edge treatment methods that had actually cured my Emily of an extremely life threatening, horrible, tumor that, just 10 or 15 years prior would have proven to be fatal for any patient with that particular diagnosis. With this being said, I can see now why the use of a birth injury lawyer would be necessary, if any parent has to go through anything like we have. It can be a lot to deal with and is not something that anyone should have deal with on their own.
Shortly after Emily’s heartbreaking death from a horrible medication error, I immediately began researching preventable medical error, desperately trying to educate myself on why these tragedies occur at such an astonishing number in the United States and globally, each and every year. To me, as well as many others, these annual numbers of deaths that had been reported in historic studies like “To Err is Human” in 1999, by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), were completely unacceptable and did not have to happen in the first place. Again, in my opinion, they are called preventable medical errors for a reason. They really are preventable! When the IOM first introduced this landmark study in 1999, they tried as best as they could to very accurately assess the number of deaths that occur every year in America. The number that they were able to quantify, at that time, was over 100,000 lives each and every year. I was completely shocked to learn that this many people died every year just like Emily did!
In the years following this initial IOM report, through the use of what are called “global trigger tools”, SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation) tools, etc., the new numbers of estimated deaths in the United States from preventable medical errors, began to climb substantially and double to over 200,000 lives lost every year in America. This is why it is essential to have contacts with reliable personal injury lawyers so that you can claim the compensation you deserve.
I began to think to myself that either number was horrific and senseless. There were so many questions that I had. I started to wonder why the total number of deaths had doubled? Were there really twice as many people dying from preventable medical error a decade after the IOM’s report, or was the core of the problem in the accuracy of the reporting? If this was the case, was the real number of deaths that occur annually in the United States even larger than the 200,000 that was being used? Then I began to ponder the question, that in 2006, when Emily died, would she have been included in those numbers? If not, her short life wouldn’t have even amounted to an accurate statistic. Was that what everyone was telling me? As her father, my biggest fear was that my little Emily would have been completely forgotten and her short life wouldn’t have even been counted, as if she had never even been born. What about all of the other lives that had been lost so tragically from preventable medical error? All because we as a society and the medical community had no way of accurately counting the real number of lives lost to preventable medical errors. As you can probably already tell, this whole notion has never sat very well with me. As I’m sure you will agree, this is definitely not the way we should be honoring our loved ones, especially after their lives had ended so abruptly and unexpectedly!
A retired NASA scientist by the name of John James, who heartbreakingly lost his 19-year old son to multiple preventable medical errors as a result of cardiologist’s mistakes at two separate medical facilities in Houston, also dedicated the remainder of his life’s work to honoring his son’s life by improving hospital safety and founding an organization called Patient Safety America. Flash-forward to September of 2013, John authored a comprehensive study that had its conclusion published in the Journal of Patient Safety called “A New Evidence-based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care” (September 2013 – Volume 9 – Issue 3 – p 122–128). This ground breaking study put the new number at 440,000 lives lost in America every year due to preventable medical error, making preventable medical error the third leading cause of death, aside from heart disease and cancer!
Shortly after this important study was released, I began presenting and discussing it’s validity in virtually all of my presentations with some of our nation’s brightest minds in medicine. I was really hoping and praying that the “experts” in the medical community would be able to tell me that it wasn’t really true. I became obsessed with requesting anyone who would take the time, including a few people associated with the IOM, to review this study in an effort to find any possible flaws. To date, absolutely no one has been able to find any. In fact, the feedback I have received has been quite the contrary. A number of respected people in medicine have said, that in their professional opinion, they believe the annual number of deaths in our nation most likely exceeds 440,000!
As utterly shocking as these numbers are, my biggest fear now is the very “human” conditioned response to problems that appear so incredibly overwhelming, hopeless, and unfixable. It’s very common for virtually anyone to go through a stage of complete denial with respect to the real situation and problem at hand. With this thought in mind, I am genuinely hoping and praying that we as a society, as well as, the medical community, patient safety oriented organization, and fellow advocates like myself, can get past this denial stage, as quickly as possible and truly begin fixing the problems associated with “human error”, internal systems, processes, and protocols, in medicine that are leading to hundreds of thousands of lives lost every year in America. With real hope, forgiveness, compassion, and collaboration, I truly believe we can get to zero deaths from preventable medical errors during my lifetime!
Recent media reports on deaths associated with preventable medical errors:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2013/09/23/stunning-news-on-preventable-deaths-in-hospitals/
http://m.healthcareitnews.com/news/deaths-by-medical-mistakes-hit-records
A great new article about the foundation and Emily’s story has been recently released on Cleveland.com and ran today, July 6, in the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Page 2! We hope this gets excellent exposure for the foundation as well as for the speaking engagement scheduled for this week at Lake Erie College on July 8th. Please spread the news, the more in attendance the better. To read the entire article click here.
A scan of the actual printed edition is also attached below. Click on the image to view a larger version…
I am very excited to have been invited as a guest speaker to The New Orleans Conference: Practices in Cardiac Surgery and Extracorporeal Technologies which gets underway today! I will be speaking about Emily’s story, helping once again to push the envelope for positive change. Check out the conference website and info on my speech by clicking here.
I was very fortunate to have recently been invited onto Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org Podcast to tell Emily’s tragic story. Each of these interviews are vitally important because of the great opportunity to reach a new audience that may potentially include an influencer or two who can drive major change. Emily’s story speaks for itself and the work we continue to do on a daily basis is SAVING LIVES. I am honored to be able to continue the fight for a reduction of the human error component of medicine through technology and best practices. Mark’s blog is a great place to learn innovative information about what those best practices are. I can’t wait to join his podcast again in the near future. Thanks Mark for your passion and grace! And a big thank you in advance to Emily’s Army (that’s YOU my dear readers!) for sharing this interview and especially Mark’s blog, which is jam-packed with engaging material. Let’s keep pressing on toward the goal together!
Click here to listen to my interview on the LeanBlog.org Podcast
I’m very pleased to say, that the video segment from the interview I did on Huff Post Live this past November, was used on the AOL homepage in the UK towards the end of March! It’s very exciting to be getting this type of exposure for the foundation. Little by little, day by day, more people are getting the opportunity to hear Emily’s story. This can only be a good thing, as the more lives she touches, the more she will save. I truly pray each pharmacy technician and hospital worker who hears it will be motivated to utilize new systems in their hospital that will minimize the human error component of medicine. Meanwhile, our mission continues!
Here is a link to the AOL-UK Homepage featuring the video titled: “My Daughter Beat Cancer But Died From A Hospital Mistake”
As we had previously reported, the Emily Jerry Foundation was proud to attend the annual Health Information Management Systems Society event held in Orlando, Florida this past February. There were so many great attendees, special guests, and speakers there, the event was truly inspiring. We made incredible connections while networking with some of the most cutting edge minds in the world regarding Healthcare technology systems. It was an event that re-energized the foundation and really sparked us to give even more effort than we already had been. Healthcare technology constantly makes leaps and bounds in the medical world, everything that gets progressed is for the benefit of the patients that come through hospital doors. Foresee Medical develops healthcare software that can help estimate patients’ healthcare costs for their futures.
While attending this event, the Emily Jerry Foundation was honored with the Education Award in the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion, sponsored by the RFID in Healthcare Consortium. This award is given to a worthy organization that is dedicated to improving healthcare delivery through better education. We feel truly blessed to be recognized in such an esteemed manner by our peers. We continue to press on toward the goal of minimizing preventable patient deaths in our hospital systems across the US. Below are scans of the program to the event where we were presented with the award along with the actual certificate, an article that featured the Emily Jerry Foundation, as well as some other promotional materials from the evening.
Again we’d like to say Thank You to our partners for giving us this incredible honor! We fully intend on continuing to push the patient safety movement forward as much as humanly possible!
We have mentioned this article in the past, but I recently received the printed version in the mail and thought the scans would be much more powerful than the online link. As soon as I finished scanning the images I noticed I had a great testimonial in my email from someone who was moved to respond because of this very article. I’d like to share this email with you all:
Christopher,
I just read your interview in the March 2014 Pharmacy Purchasing & Products insert. It moved me to respond and share a success story from my hospital. We installed an IV Workflow system (DoseEdge™) in our pharmacy in late 2010. During dose preparation the technician must scan barcodes on the drug, diluent and fluid to ensure the ingredients are correct. They also take pictures of the amount of drug in the syringe before injecting into the bag for the pharmacist to verify.We average 20 intercepted errors per week. I believe most of these would have been caught by the pharmacist, but…… In addition to DoseEdge there are several robotic and manual systems on the market. Perhaps in a future publication your foundation could advocate for barcode scanning in all sterile compounding.
P.S. I really like the angel label idea and plan to incorporate into my process.
Stephen L. Speth, RPh
Pharmacy Manager
Indiana University Health Bloomington Hospital
601 W. 2nd St.
Bloomington, IN 47402
812-353-5615
I get so encouraged when I read things like this. A special Thank You goes out to Stephen Speth for sending me this note. It means we are starting to win the battle for patient safety, and gives me more motivation than you can imagine to press on! Please click on the image below to download a pdf of the scanned article as it printed in the latest issue of Pharmacy Purchasing & Products Magazine.
The Emily Jerry Foundation is determined to help make our nation’s, world renowned, medical facilities safer for everyone, beginning with our babies and children. We are accomplishing this very important objective by focusing on increasing public awareness of key patient safety related issues and identifying technology and best practices that are proven to minimize the “human error” component of medicine. Through our ongoing efforts The Emily Jerry Foundation is working hard to save lives every day.
Last Updated: March 11, 2018 by ejfadmin
Announcing a New Partnership Between The Emily Jerry Foundation and KLAS Research
I first became aware of KLAS when I gave a keynote at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
Annual Conference in Orlando, this past February. KLAS Research, based in Orem, Utah, has an extremely important mission statement; “Our mission is to improve healthcare technology delivery by honestly, accurately, and impartially measuring vendor performance for our provider partners”. Measuring the performance of your vendors is something that many firms drop the ball on, which is why specialists in the field are offering methods in suppliers performance management in order to avoid these issues as much as possible.
KLAS is an independent research firm based in Orem, Utah; established in 1996. KLAS is similar to Consumer Reports, only for Healthcare IT. They conduct over 30,000 interviews per year with healthcare providers to gain qualitative and quantitative data on over 1,000 healthcare IT products within 100+ healthcare IT market segments. They maintain an active database of rankings, performance scores, alerts and blogs to provide vendor transparency to providers on existing technologies.
Similarly, a very key part of The Emily Jerry Foundation’s mission statement is “identifying technology and best practices that are proven to minimize the human error component of medicine.” This is where I saw that both of our organization’s core goals and objectives are in perfect alignment, in striving to always be an active part of the solution to improving healthcare.
I was contacted by the KLAS team, a few months ago, as they were in the process of beginning research on a comprehensive study covering intravenous (IV) compounding technologies that are currently available from various manufacturers. It is absolutely imperative that this vital “life saving” technology be evaluated objectively in an unbiased manner. This is precisely what KLAS does and exactly why The Emily Jerry Foundation is looking forward to establishing a very long, mutually beneficial, relationship between our organizations!
Learn more at klasresearch.com