IRVINE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 12, 2013) - The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, a leading non-profit organization dedicated to solving health care's most critical safety and quality problems, and the Patient Safety Movement Foundation are partnering to host a summit to help eliminate the many preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals by 2020.

The Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit, scheduled January 11-13, 2014, will gather industry leaders to focus on three problematic areas in health care today -- improving the effectiveness of hand-off communications, reducing health care acquired infections, and creating a culture of safety. These three new focus areas will add to the challenges identified in the 2013 Patient Safety Science and Technology Summit including failure to rescue, medication errors, blood transfusion overuse, intravascular catheter-related infections, sub-optimal neonatal oxygen targeting, and failure to detect critical congenital heart disease. In addition to the groundbreaking med-tech commitments made in 2013 for patient data displayed on all devices, at the 2014 Summit hospitals and med-tech companies will commit to actively participate in improving patient safety and quality.

"This upcoming Summit presents an opportunity to gather a unique group of stakeholders -- patient advocates and those from medical technology companies and hospitals to address the most pressing patient safety problems facing the health care industry," said Dr. Mark R. Chassin, president and CEO of The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. "The Joint Commission and the Center for Transforming Healthcare's goals for improving patient safety are directly aligned with the mission of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. We need to do something different to achieve these challenging goals and the Patient Safety Movement Foundation is about taking action, rather than just talking about change. We share the passion and commitment it will take to eliminate preventable patient deaths by 2020."

In January 2013, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation brought together industry leaders at the inaugural Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit. President Bill Clinton headlined the Summit and attendees from around the world vowed to take action and implement specific steps to dramatically improve patient safety. The Summit also made history when for the first time nine leading medical technology companies -- including Cercacor, Cerner, Dräger, GE Healthcare Systems, Masimo, Smiths Medical, Sonosite, Surgicount, and Zoll -- publicly committed to make available the data their devices display so that it can be shared across devices to improve patient safety. For example, data from an IV pump would be openly shared not just with the electronic health record but also with other devices such as patient monitors (and vice versa) while complying with all patient privacy laws. With the med-tech industry sharing the data their products are purchased for, finally there is an opportunity to create a patient data "superhighway" for real-time analysis and presentation of the status of the patient. The commitments to data sharing are designed to help eliminate preventable patient deaths at U.S. hospitals by providing caregivers easy access to accurate and complete data needed to make clinical decisions and provide treatment.