In our increasingly complex healthcare system, patients face a critical challenge on how to choose the safest hospital for their care. While there are massive databases on hospital performance, much of it focuses on specific procedures or conditions. Those of us in the patient safety world have always known that most harms have a root cause in the institutional practices that are part of the culture of each health system. Now, a groundbreaking new measurement system is changing the game by evaluating hospitals' overall "structural" safety – and it's a tool every healthcare consumer should know about.
