A Revolutionary Approach to Emergency Medicine Patient Safety and Risk Management

The Sullivan Group (TSG) was founded to help emergency practitioners establish best practices, enhance patient safety, and reduce both medical errors and the resulting exposure to litigation. Founded by Daniel J. Sullivan, MD, JD, FACEP, TSG has assembled an outstanding group of medical, risk, and information technology professionals to create solutions to the substantial challenge of providing cutting edge medical care in a safe practice environment. TSG programs represent a revolution in the approach to patient safety and risk management.

Dr. Daniel J. Sullivan is a board-certified emergency physician with over 25 years of emergency medicine practice experience, an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, and a past president of the Illinois Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). Dr. Sullivan, who is also an attorney, is an editor of ACEP’s Emergency Medicine Risk Management, 2d Ed., and has authored numerous books and publications, and provided hundreds of lectures focused on patient safety and risk management in emergency medicine.

Over 600 clients have instituted The Sullivan Group’s Emergency Medicine Risk Initiative (EMRI®), which includes web-based patient safety education, real-time risk management tools at the bedside, and web-based performance appraisal with feedback to the emergency department team. The results have been dramatic. One client with over 180 hospitals has reduced its emergency medicine malpractice claims by 38% over a 3-year period and removed tens of millions of dollars from company malpractice reserves.

Risk management must be real-time and occur at the bedside. The Sullivan Group has designed ‘intelligent’ medical records, both paper and electronic, that allow the emergency practitioner to apply the principles of patient safety and risk management during the patient encounter.

This is the bedrock of patient safety and risk management in any risk-sensitive organization. Historically, safety and risk management have been successfully achieved by those organizations (e.g., aviation, nuclear industry) that adhere to the fundamentals of safety education, real-time processes to guarantee quality, and a statistical measure of performance. The Sullivan Group has applied these principles to the practice of emergency medicine with astonishing results. The Cycle of Patient Safety and Risk Management has had a profound and beneficial impact on patient outcomes and on minimizing legal risk.