Errors of Omission: The Impact of What is NOT Done on Patient Experience

Keren Stronach, MPH, Cancer Services Patient Experience Manager, UCSF Mission Hall

Systems for information gathering are designed to capture the impact of our actions and interactions with patients but not the impact of our inaction – the steps not taken – which can significantly affect the quality of care and patient experience. This presentation will review the findings from two innovative patient improvement projects designed to discover what we don’t know. We will focus on factors that tend not to be tracked or counted, such as Errors of Omission (what wasn’t done/missed opportunities), that impact patient experience. These omissions tend to be issues for which no one is accountable and are often invisible to the institution and to the patients themselves.