Candidate: Dr. Khan is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a hospitalist and health services researcher at Boston Children's Hospital (BCH). At BCH, she completed a joint pediatric hospital medicine and AHRQ-funded T32 pediatric health services research fellowship, an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and an AHRQ-funded institutional K12 in Child and Family PCOR. Dr. Khan studies family engagement in hospital communication and safety and helped develop a pilot parent error-reporting methodology for use in safety surveillance research. Her prior work has explored safety reporting in limited research settings, using quantitative methods. She has not studied how to implement such tools in daily hospital operations or explored barriers and facilitators to reporting through in-depth qualitative inquiry. Building on her early work, her proposed career development plan focuses on 3 areas of career development?qualitative methods, communication science, and organizational behavior?that will add to her research toolkit, increase the rigor of her work, and enhance her ability to develop, evaluate, and disseminate effective family safety engagement efforts. She will gain these skills through coursework, experiential learning, mentorship, and participation in national conferences, journal clubs, and seminars. Environment: Dr. Khan is supported by extensive research, professional, and academic resources at BCH, HMS, and HSPH, including the Office of Faculty Development, the Institutional Centers for Clinical and Translational Research, and the Countway Library of Medicine. Her committed team of mentors and advisors include national experts in patient safety, quality measurement, communication science, qualitative methods, organizational behavior, children with medical complexity (CMC), patient advocacy, and nursing leadership. Research: Despite increasing evidence of its utility, patient and family engagement in safety reporting has not been effectively operationalized in hospitals. AHRQ recently piloted a consumer safety reporting system, the Health Care Safety Hotline, which found that a centralized online system was feasible but suffered from low reporting rates. Dr. Khan's prior work found that more intensively prompting parents yielded higher rates of parent reporting in research. Dr. Khan proposes to build on this work to rigorously evaluate and develop?through qualitative methods, communication science, and organizational behavior?a feasible and acceptable family safety reporting system that results in operationally high reporting rates for CMC. She will explore parent, provider, and hospital leader perceptions of barriers to and facilitators of family safety reporting (Aim 1) and develop and evaluate a pilot family safety reporting intervention (Aim 2). At the end of this project, Dr. Khan will be well-positioned to apply for a multicenter R01 to further test whether this intervention improves reporting in a larger, more varied sample of patients and hospitals. A K08 award will propel her to the next stage of her career as an independent investigator improving patient safety through family engagement.
Up to 250,000 patients may die each year in the United States as a result of medical errors, making them a leading cause of death nationwide. Although patients and families can provide critically important information on hospital safety, patient and family safety reporting has not yet been widely operationalized in hospitals. By coproducing with parents, physicians, nurses, and hospital leaders a feasible, acceptable, and well-used system for patient and family safety reporting, our project has the potential to inform safety promotion efforts and improve the safety and quality of hospital care nationwide.
