Patient Safety: The PROACT Root Cause Analysis Approach

As Medicare, Medicaid, and major insurance companies increasingly deny payment for “never events”, it has become imperative that hospitals and doctors develop new ways to prevent these avoidable catastrophes from recurring. Proactive tools such as root cause analysis (RCA), basic failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and opportunity analysis (OA) are useful in preventing error, but in the healthcare field, such tools are often constrained by reticence to share information about mistakes and other inhibitive paradigms inherent to the industry.