Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The 2005 Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act, actualized as a Learning Network (LN), has enabled the Child Health Patient Safety Organization (PSO) to play a vital and novel role in improving the quality and safety of care. This article describes the Child Health PSO and proposes PSOs as a new construct for LNs. METHODS: A PSOs ability to affect patient care depends on member organizations' integration of PSO output into their individual Learning Healthcare Systems. Therefore, the Child Health PSO developed tenets of an LN to improve member engagement in PSO outputs. RESULTS: All Child Health PSO members participate in case-based learning, requiring ongoing and robust participation by all members. The engagement has been strong, with 86% of children's hospitals achieving a case learning activity metric and 60% of children's hospitals submitting cases. From this LNs perspective, 53% of children's hospitals are considered highly engaged. CONCLUSIONS: In the last 10 years, the Child Health PSO has evolved as a viable LN and, to sustain this, has set a target of 100% of participating children's hospitals being highly engaged. The previously inconceivable notion of sharing information to improve patient safety among hospitals is now an expected result of the formation of trusting relationships under a federally certified PSO. According to participants, collaboration is an essential element that empowers individual children's hospitals to eliminate preventable harm.