ABSTRACT
Fostering collaboration has been emphasized by many as a key strategy for improving patient safety (Goode, Clancy, Kimball, Meyer, & Eisenberg, 2002; Institute of Medicine Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, 2001). Collaboration within health care organizations has been mostly emphasized. For instance, team work and crew resource management (CRM) are seen as methods for improving communication and fostering collab oration between health care providers for increased quality and safety of care (Helmreich & Schaefer, 1994; Morey et al., 2002; Thomas, Sherwood, & Helmreich, 2003). Collaboration across health care organizations should also be encouraged to improve patient safety. First, collaboration between organizations that experience similar patient safety problems may contribute to sharing of experi ence, improve the solutions to the patient safety
problems, and facilitate the implementation of those solutions. Second, many patient safety prob lems occur at the interface between organizations. For example, the creation and maintenance of accurate medication lists require both inpatient and outpatient organizations to work together (Cornish et al., 2005; van Walraven, Mamdani, Fang, & Austin, 2004). The problems occurring at the interface between multiple organizations cannot be solved by a single organization but need to be addressed collaboratively by the various organi zations involved in the problems. Collaborative initiatives are one mechanism for encouraging col laboration across organizations to improve patient safety. Collaborative initiatives can also contribute to increasing the pace at which research is put into practice (Fraser, Lanier, Hellinger, & Eisenberg, 2002).
