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At Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, our commitment to patient safety is one of our top priorities. Improving patient safety can help make health care more affordable and will have an impact on the overall quality of your life. We've undertaken several initiatives to help support the physicians and hospitals we work with.
Quality Care Dosing (Medication Therapy Management)
We recently provided $50 million to help fund the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, which is a statewide program that will focus on developing an electronic health record system. Electronic medical records help provide complete, readily available medical information and have been shown to improve patient safety. In addition to electronic medical records, the eHealth Collaborative will focus on offering health care providers electronic decision-support tools. This initiative is being developed with the help of 35 health care organizations throughout Massachusetts.
In 2004, we pledged $3 million to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), an internationally recognized not-for-profit organization based in Massachusetts. The IHI will use funding to support its national patient safety campaign and will also apply it $2.5 million of the total grant toward supporting Massachusetts hospitals conducting quality and patient safety improvement projects.
