Leveraging Existing Assessments of Risk Now (LEARN) Safety Analysis: A Method for Extending Patient Safety Learning

Prospective risk assessments are being conducted at health care institutions across the country in response to the Joint Commission requirement. However, an opportunity is being missed to combine these risk assessments to identify generic risks and risk contributors across institutions. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) applies a successful methodology, known as “risk binning,” to analyze a group of risk assessments to identify generic risks and risk contributors. Establishing high-priority targets and identifying effective interventions for health care are essential to improve patient safety. This article describes how the Leveraging Existing Assessments of Risk Now (LEARN) Safety Analysis method can be used to analyze a group of risk assessments through the application of “risk binning” methodology to existing risk assessments from multiple institutions. Background Risk assessments, such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), have been shown to be effective for identifying, assessing, and addressing risks in many life-critical industries that must function with high reliability, including medicine. 2 The process of conducting a thorough FMEA in medicine is time and resource intensive, yet the results of these detailed assessments are rarely shared. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has developed a successful standardized methodology using “risk binning,” which enables the analysis of a group of risk assessments across institutions to identify generic risks and risk contributors from processes and systems. In this article, we use a group of risk assessments to illustrate the application of this methodology in medicine. Although prospective risk assessments are being conducted at health care institutions across the country in response to the Joint Commission’s requirement, an important opportunity is being missed—i.e., using these risk assessments to identify generic risks and risk contributors to improve the understanding of similar processes across institutions. By adapting methods from other high-risk industries, risk assessments from multiple institutions can be analyzed to improve our understanding of the significant risks and risk contributors of health care processes across